If APC under President Tinubu can pad budgets, alter tax reform bills and include a name in the ambassadorial list that was not screened by the Senate, how sure are we that he will not pad the 2027 general election he is apparently desperate to win?
Nigeria did not wake up one morning and stumble into this moment. What we are witnessing today is not an isolated incident, not a technical innovation gone wrong, and not an innocent administrative reform. It is the logical continuation of a pattern that began shortly after Bola Ahmed Tinubu assumed office on May 29, 2023—a pattern marked by procedural shortcuts, blurred institutional boundaries, and an ever-expanding concentration of power.
Within less than three years, the Tinubu administration has been dogged by persistent allegations and controversies that all point in one troubling direction: rules can be bent, processes can be altered, and oversight can be treated as a nuisance rather than a necessity. From claims of budget padding and post-approval insertions, to controversial tax law alterations pushed through at breakneck speed, to the appearance of a name on an ambassadorial list reportedly without Senate screening, the signal has been consistent. Whether each allegation is ultimately upheld or not is almost secondary. In a democracy, patterns matter. And this pattern is unmistakable.
It is against this background—not in a vacuum—that the All Progressives Congress (APC) has introduced a new online membership registration and revalidation system that demands something unprecedented in Nigerian partisan politics: citizens’ Permanent Voter’s Card (PVC) details, National Identification Number (NIN), and declared religion, all warehoused in a party-controlled digital database.
This is where governance style meets democratic danger.
Let us be clear. Political parties registering members is not new. Digitisation, on its own, is not evil. But what is being collected, by whom, and in what political climate is what turns this exercise from routine administration into a national red flag.
The PVC is not an ordinary card. It is the physical gateway to the ballot. Embedded within it—through the Voter Identification Number (VIN)—is a citizen’s electoral identity. The NIN goes even further, tying an individual to a biometric national database that underpins banking, telecommunications, travel, and government services. When you combine PVC-linked data with NIN-linked data, you create something far more powerful than a party register. You create near-total voter traceability.
APC now knows—at least in theory—who you are, where you vote, how you are registered, and how to uniquely identify you across multiple national systems. That alone should alarm anyone who understands how fragile trust in Nigeria’s electoral process already is.
Then comes the religion question.
For years, APC leaders have insisted that Nigeria must move beyond identity politics. They have preached competence over religion, dismissing public outrage over religious imbalance in appointments as sentimentality. Yet here is the same party formally asking Nigerians to declare their religion as part of a political database. If religion truly does not matter, why record it? What democratic function does that information serve? And why, in a country where religion has been weaponised repeatedly, would a party voluntarily step into such combustible territory?
Even if APC insists the data will never be used, that assurance rings hollow. In politics, intent is less important than capacity. The mere possession of such granular identity data changes the balance of power between citizens and political organisations.
Supporters of the registration drive argue that it is meant to eliminate fake members and strengthen internal democracy. But that defence collapses under scrutiny. You do not need religion to prevent duplicate registrations. You do not need NIN to validate party loyalty. And you certainly do not need PVC details unless electoral relevance is part of the calculation.
This brings us to the most dangerous intersection of all: party-held voter-linked data and the growing push for online or technology-driven voting processes, especially within party primaries.
Digital voting systems are not neutral tools. They are controlled environments. Whoever controls the backend controls the outcome. Even in advanced democracies with robust institutions, online voting remains controversial because it is difficult to audit independently and nearly impossible for ordinary participants to verify. In Nigeria—where elections are routinely disputed, court cases are the norm, and confidence in institutions is fragile—introducing digital voting without ironclad safeguards is not reform. It is provocation.
A political party that aggregates PVC and NIN data cannot also be trusted to unilaterally manage digital voting systems without independent oversight. That is not an accusation; it is a basic principle of conflict-of-interest management. You cannot be player, referee, and scorekeeper at the same time.
Predictably, defenders of the status quo respond with a familiar refrain: INEC will handle elections, not APC. But this response ignores a central reality. Elections are not sustained by laws alone; they are sustained by trust. And trust, in Nigeria today, is in short supply.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) itself operates under intense public suspicion. Its chairman, has faced sustained scrutiny over past writings attributed to him on religious violence in Northern Nigeria—writings critics say were strong on accusation and weak on evidence. There is no court ruling declaring him biased. There is no legal finding against INEC as an institution. But once again, politics does not operate on courtroom thresholds. It operates on public confidence.
In an environment where the electoral umpire is already viewed with suspicion by large segments of the population, the ruling party’s accumulation of sensitive voter-linked data only deepens the crisis of credibility. Even neutral actions begin to look sinister when trust is absent.
The danger here is not theoretical. Consider two rational assumptions—both troubling.
First assumption: APC has no malicious intent. The data will be stored, unused, and forgotten. Even under this generous interpretation, the problem remains. A massive, centralised database containing PVC, NIN, religion, and contact details becomes a national security liability. Data breaches are not hypothetical. They are routine. If such information leaks, Nigerians are exposed to profiling, targeting, intimidation, and fraud on an unprecedented scale.
Second assumption: APC intends to use the data strategically. This is where democracy truly trembles. Strategic use does not require crude rigging. It can mean targeted mobilisation, selective suppression, demographic mapping, and psychological manipulation—subtle tools that leave no fingerprints but alter outcomes all the same.
Either scenario is bad for the people. One risks catastrophic exposure; the other risks silent manipulation.
This is why context matters. President Tinubu’s government has already been accused—fairly or unfairly—of pursuing power consolidation aggressively. Critics point to his early political manoeuvres after 2023 as evidence of a leadership obsessed with re-election by any means necessary. When such a perception exists, every additional concentration of power is interpreted through that lens. And perception, in politics, becomes reality.
Nigeria’s democracy will not collapse with soldiers on the streets or tanks at polling units. It will erode quietly—through databases no one fully understands, systems no one can independently audit, and processes that move faster than public scrutiny.
The central question, therefore, is unavoidable:
Now that APC has your voter card number, who really controls your vote—the citizen, the party, or the system behind the screen?
Democracy is not merely about casting a ballot every four years. It is about who controls the infrastructure of choice. When political power begins to dominate that infrastructure, freedom becomes conditional, not guaranteed.
Nigerians must demand more than reassurances. They must demand clear data-use limits, independent audits, the immediate removal of religion from partisan databases, and a strict separation between party data and any form of voting technology. Anything less is an invitation to abuse.
History teaches a brutal lesson: democracies rarely die loudly. They are dismantled quietly, in the name of efficiency, reform, and progress—until citizens realise too late that what they surrendered for convenience was their sovereignty.
And by then, the vote no longer belongs to them.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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