Electoral officers gathered in Abuja this week for a two-day workshop aimed at closing off one of the more overlooked threats to Nigeria’s next general election, corruption within the machinery that runs it, rather than just at the ballot box itself.
The Anti-Corruption Education and Sensitisation Workshop, themed “Corruption-Free Election: Integrity Matters,” opened Monday at INEC headquarters as a joint effort between the electoral commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, according to a statement from INEC’s Director of Voter Education and Publicity, Victoria Etta-Messi.
For INEC, the timing reflects where the commission sees itself in the 2027 preparation cycle. National Commissioner May Agbamuche-Mbu, representing Chairman Prof. Joash Amupitan, told attendees that as the country’s electoral umpire, INEC carries a responsibility to shape national conversations around integrity, since elections underpin the democratic system itself. Her argument was straightforward: once public confidence in an election is shaken, that damage doesn’t stay contained to the vote, it spreads into how citizens view governance and institutions more broadly. She thanked ICPC for supplying resource persons for the training and encouraged participants to treat the sessions as more than a formality, pushing them to question, engage, and build professional connections that would carry into future election cycles.
ICPC brought a more institutional argument to the table. Chairman Musa Adamu, represented by Director of Legal Services Henry Emore, framed corruption as one of the defining obstacles to development in this era, and situated the workshop’s theme within that larger fight. His most concrete point was financial: elections run without integrity don’t just produce disputed outcomes, they generate real costs downstream, supplementary elections, extended security deployments to maintain order, and a surge of petitions and litigation that ends up back on anti-corruption agencies’ desks. That cost, he suggested, is what makes prevention worth investing in upfront rather than dealing with the fallout later.
Emore also used the platform to acknowledge the people actually running elections on the ground, describing electoral officers as workers who frequently put themselves at real risk in the course of their duties. Between INEC’s institutional stake in credibility and ICPC’s focus on the downstream cost of corruption, both sides framed the collaboration as necessary groundwork, one they expect to translate into concrete recommendations feeding into how the commission conducts the 2027 vote.
