The Death of the Mercenary Delegate: Will the Electoral Act 2026 Save or Sabotage Party Primaries?

By Ibrahim Nasiru

“He who controls the rules of an election does not care who casts the votes.”

This timeless political truth has shifted from a theoretical warning to a brutal reality across Nigeria following the tumultuous conclusion of the May 2026 party primaries.

Across various states, contending political forces are locked in fierce, highly controversial battles over the transparency, conduct, and legitimacy of the newly mandated nomination processes. This friction has brought back a fundamental, long-standing question: which voting method is truly best for Nigeria’s evolving democracy?

For decades, this debate was treated as a generic comparison between the direct and indirect primary models. However, the paradigm completely shifted when President Bola Tinubu signed the Electoral Act 2026 into law, legally abolishing the infamous, delegate-based indirect system. While the eradication of mercenary delegates aimed to dismantle the open monetization of party tickets, the messy implementation of the post-delegate reality has exposed a highly volatile set of new political manipulation tactics that threaten the integrity of the 2027 general elections.

To understand why the Electoral Act 2026 represents such a radical shift, one must look at the institutional decay of the old indirect primary system. For years, the delegate system functioned as little more than a cash-and-carry marketplace. A tiny, exclusive elite of handpicked party members held a total monopoly over who could appear on the general election ballot. This dynamic turned internal party democracy into an aggressive bidding war.

During high-stakes primary elections, thousands of delegates were routinely hoarded in luxury hotels, isolated from the public, and systematically bribed with foreign currency to vote for the highest bidder. This concentration of power allowed wealthy political godfathers and sitting governors to completely monopolize party structures, locking out competent but financially constrained aspirants. By removing the delegate system entirely, the new law sought to deliver a final, fatal blow to this specific brand of monetization.

With the indirect model legally eradicated, the Electoral Act 2026 left political parties with Direct Primaries as the default operational voting option. In theory, direct primaries represent the purest form of intra-party democracy: a “one member, one vote” system that strips power away from corrupt middlemen and returns it directly to ordinary grassroots party members.

However, translating this textbook democratic ideal into the reality of Nigerian politics has presented severe practical dangers, primarily driven by the fictional register problem. Under Section 77 of the Act, political parties were strictly mandated to submit comprehensive, digitized membership registers to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) at least 21 days before the primaries.

Yet, because major political parties in Nigeria completely lack credible, independently verified, and securely digitized member databases, the recently concluded exercises descended into a farce of unverified registries.

Instead of actual democratic collation at the ward levels, powerful party factions and sitting governors simply exploited these unverified records. In multiple states, party leaders were caught manufacturing millions of fictional grassroots votes on paper, writing out pre-determined result sheets from the comfort of secure hotel suites while completely bypassing the actual electorate.

Furthermore, executing a direct primary proved to be a logistical and financial nightmare. Forcing parties to run mini-general elections across thousands of wards simultaneously created massive institutional emergencies, leaving the field highly vulnerable to localized thuggery, ballot snatching, and widespread administrative fraud.

The only legal alternative to a direct primary provided under Section 84(2) of the Act is CONSENSUS. On paper, a consensus arrangement allows a party to preserve unity, avoid costly internal friction, and select a candidate through collective agreement.

However, the law places a very strict condition on this process: a political party adopting a consensus candidate must secure the written, signed consent of every single cleared aspirant for that specific position. Each aspirant must formally state their voluntary withdrawal and explicitly endorse the chosen consensus candidate.

If even one cleared aspirant refuses to sign the agreement, the consensus automatically collapses, and the party is legally compelled to revert to a direct primary.

While this provision was designed to prevent autocratic party leaders from imposing candidates, the May 2026 primary cycle turned it into an institutional weapon known as the consensus trap. Ahead of the voting deadlines, this setup triggered intense backroom strong-arm tactics. Instead of fostering genuine compromise, powerful party godfathers deployed severe intimidation, blackmail, and massive financial payouts behind closed doors to forcefully compel weaker or minority aspirants to sign away their ambitions. It effectively replaced the open, dollarized corruption of the old delegate system with a covert, high-stakes game of coercion and backroom extortion.

Because the rules have dramatically changed, the primary election battlefield has shifted entirely. Control of the party’s physical and digital membership register is now the ultimate prize. Realizing how desperate politicians would become to manipulate these numbers, the National Assembly swiftly introduced a critical amendment to the Electoral Act 2026 that expressly prohibits dual party membership and criminalizes violations with severe legal penalties.

This legal boundary was introduced to stop a common, highly toxic political maneuver: a situation where a powerful political actor quietly instructs their loyalists to hold memberships in multiple political parties simultaneously. By infiltrating a rival party’s register, an external godfather could effectively hijack their opponent’s direct primary, voting en masse for the weakest possible rival candidate to guarantee an easy victory in the general election.

By criminalizing dual membership, the legislature has drawn a sharp line, but enforcement remains an incredibly complex game of cat-and-mouse.

The actual execution of the May 2026 primaries has delivered a definitive verdict: the Electoral Act 2026 successfully closed the door on the mercenary delegate, but it has triggered a full-blown institutional emergency across Nigeria’s political landscape.

What was sold to the public as a cleaner, more inclusive democratic dawn has instead left major political parties deeply fractured, drowning in rejected results, bruised egos, and a wave of high-profile political casualties. Rather than sanitizing the political space, the mandatory direct primary system merely forced desperate politicians to adapt their tricks, moving the theater of corruption from buying delegates in a stadium to faking millions of votes on a poorly secured digital register, or forcefully blackmailing lone aspirants in backroom consensus meetings.

As the country inches closer to 2027, the fallout of these flawed primaries portends severe danger. With INEC already issuing stern warnings voiding primaries held outside approved guidelines, and aggrieved heavyweights actively defecting to alternative platforms, the stage is set for a massive wave of pre-election litigations that could invalidate entire party tickets.

True electoral integrity does not depend on merely changing the statutory model from indirect to direct. It relies on institutional discipline, the absolute independence of monitoring bodies, and the establishment of a truly uncorrupted internal party database.

Until Nigerian political parties prioritize genuine internal accountability over raw transactional shortcuts, the search for a perfect primary system will remain an academic illusion, proving that in our political clime, when you close an old door of corruption, politicians will always shatter a new window to gain control.

Chief Ibrahim Nasiru

A Public Affairs Analyst writes from Abuja