* Election delayed by technical hitches, cyberattack
* Our colleagues planned to truncate election but failed – Osigwe
By Teddy Nwanunobi
Against all odds, 59-year-old old Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, on Sunday, defeated two other senior lawyers in the Nigerian Bar Association’s 2026 national officers’ election to become NBA’s 33rd President.
Daily NewsCraft reports that Badejo-Okusanya is the second woman to lead the association, and the first to win the office through competitive national elections.
Before her, the only previous female president was Dame Priscilla Kuye, who served a partial term from 1991 to 1992 after the previous president vacated the office.
The election was delayed by technical challenges and a cyberattack.
The results were announced by the Chairman of the Electoral Committee of the NBA, Aham Ejelam (SAN), at the NBA National Secretariat in Abuja, following the conclusion of the election.
Ejelam said Badejo-Okusanya polled 12,317 votes, representing 47.18 per cent of the total votes cast, to defeat her closest challenger, Lateef Akangbe (SAN), who secured 7,934 votes, representing 30.39 per cent.
The third presidential candidate, Olumuyiwa Akinboro (SAN), polled 5,855 votes, representing 22.43 per cent.
According to the ECNBA Chairman, a total of 26,106 votes were recorded in the election.
With her victory, Badejo-Okusanya will serve as the association’s president for a two-year tenure spanning 2026 to 2028.
Her victory also makes her the second female president of the association, after Priscilla Kuye, who led the NBA from 1991 to 1992.
Other elected national officers include: Oghenero Okoro, who emerged as First Vice-President with 11,024 votes; Afam Okeke, who was elected General Secretary with 8,478 votes; Aghogho Gladys, who won the position of Assistant General Secretary with 14,312 votes; and Chinelo Audrey Ofoegbunam, who emerged as Welfare Secretary with 14,911 votes.
Badejo-Okusanya was absent when the results were announced.
However, a member of her campaign team, Aminu Gadanya (SAN), attributed her absence to a flight delay and said the president-elect was committed to extending a “handshake of friendship” to all aggrieved candidates in the interest of unity.
Speaking after the declaration of the results, the outgoing NBA President, Afam Osigwe (SAN), said the election survived attempts to derail the process, including a cyberattack that forced the electoral committee to rebuild and migrate its ICT system to a more secure server.
“Our colleagues planned to truncate the election, but we stood firm. Every effort to derail this process failed. This is a trying time for the Bar. In the build-up to this election, many went to great lengths to rubbish the association,” he said.
He urged the newly elected officers to be magnanimous in victory and called on unsuccessful candidates to support the new leadership.
“To those who won, be magnanimous in victory; for those who lost, there is always another day. The cyberattack shows that we must do more in data protection. Let us collectively do things in an acceptable manner,” Osigwe said.
“We must be able to promote the rule of law, and the NBA, made up of lawyers, should be able to determine the course of its electoral process. Where we made mistakes, I believe my successor will correct them.
“Winners should extend the hand of fellowship to those who lost and have a united front to move the Bar forward.
“The unity of the Bar cannot and should never be negotiated. As I now bow out, I wish the new EXCO all the very best in office.
“May we never see the day when those who lead us will be elected by people other than lawyers.”
Osigwe also disclosed that the Electoral Committee would conduct a comprehensive review of the electoral process, particularly the challenges encountered, with a view to strengthening confidence in future NBA elections and improving the association’s cybersecurity and electoral integrity.
During the buildup to the election, one of the presidential candidates, Lateef Akangbe, had called for the suspension of the ongoing poll, alleging that technical failures and security breaches have compromised the integrity of the process.
In a protest letter addressed to the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA) on Saturday, Akangbe said the election had suffered a “catastrophic structural and technical collapse” less than three hours after voting commenced.
He urged the committee to halt the exercise, preserve all voting records, commission an independent audit of the platform and postpone the election until the identified issues are resolved.
His first complaint centred on what he described as the collapse of the electronic voting portal, claiming that as of 2:09 am, the platform was inaccessible to the majority of the about 82,000 accredited voters, with users reporting errors, authentication failures and timeouts.
Akangbe said reports that votes cast before the outage would be cancelled and the process restarted raised questions about the integrity of the election.
“If the portal is inaccessible to the general membership, how were any votes cast at all? Who had access to the platform during a window in which the public could not enter?
“How can the candidates, their agents, or the membership verify that back-end ballot dumping has not already taken place during this period of total opacity?” Akangbe asked.
He argued that the committee could no longer guarantee the credibility of the process once the voting infrastructure had failed.
“A portal that collapses within the first two hours of a national election and then proposes to ‘restart’ is not a portal that can be trusted to deliver a credible result at any point thereafter,” he said.
He also accused the ECNBA of breaching its own revised electronic voting guidelines by allegedly sending one-time passwords (OTPs) through email instead of SMS.
Akangbe said the committee had, less than 24 hours earlier, announced that authentication codes would be delivered “strictly via SMS to registered mobile number” to address concerns over email-based manipulation observed in previous NBA elections.
However, he alleged that voters had begun receiving OTPs via email shortly after voting opened.
“This is not a minor technical glitch. This is a complete and bad-faith breach of the security architecture that the ECNBA itself published. If OTPs are being delivered via email, the entire authentication framework is compromised,” he said.
He further alleged that the electronic ballot displayed the photograph of only one of the three cleared presidential candidates, while the photographs of the others, including his, were either omitted or failed to render.
He argued that the defect created an unfair visual advantage and called into question the adequacy of the platform’s pre-election testing and certification.
“A ballot that displays one candidate’s photograph while omitting the others is not a neutral instrument,” he said.
Akangbe demanded that the electoral committee immediately suspend the election until the issues are addressed.
He warned that proceeding with the election under the prevailing conditions would produce a result lacking legitimacy.
“A flawed, rushed election carried out today under these chaotic conditions cannot yield a credible result.
“Whoever is declared the winner of an election conducted on a collapsed portal, with breached authentication, and on a visually defective ballot, will not lead the Bar with the confidence of the profession,” he said.
Similarly, some lawyers took to social media to express concerns about technical glitches, alleged disenfranchisement and low voter turnout in the election.
The complaints, shared on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday, followed delays in the start of voting after the Nigerian Bar Association’s Electoral Committee (ECNBA) announced that its electronic voting platform had been hacked.
Legal practitioner and social media commentator Suave Lawyer (@jurist_oriko) said he was eventually able to cast his vote after experiencing difficulties, but questioned the turnout.
“After all the shenanigans, I have just been able to cast my vote. Only 17,000 people have voted out of over 82,000 registered voters as of 2:30 p.m.; something is fundamentally wrong with the process. This is a low turnout so far,” he wrote.
Another lawyer, Vanessa Yashim, alleged that the voting system repeatedly rejected her Supreme Court enrolment number and that attempts to reach the organisers’ contact numbers were unsuccessful.
“System that keeps invalidating my Supreme Court Number, and when I tried calling the contact numbers listed, none was going through. This is a poor display of the electoral process by the NBA,” she posted.
Lawyer Tobi Olanipekun also claimed that several lawyers had complained that they were unable to receive one-time passwords (OTPs) because the phone numbers displayed on the voting portal were not theirs.
“A lot of lawyers have reached out to me with complaints of being disenfranchised. The phone numbers on their portal, which are supposed to receive OTP, are not theirs. The funniest part is that the fake phone numbers are the same across the board,” he wrote.
However, some lawyers disputed the allegations, saying the process had improved after the early technical issues.
Responding to another user, Josiah wrote, “A lot of us have voted, and there were no issues on our end. There were issues in the initial phase from 12:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., but that has been rectified.”
Similarly, another user, identified as Master P, said, “The process was seamless for me as of 10:31 a.m.”
Lawyer Joel, Esq., criticised the conduct of the election, arguing that the NBA had lost the moral authority to criticise public elections.
“I can imagine that INEC must be laughing at us now. The NBA has no moral high ground to critique the credibility of elections… The election has been compromised, and if a winner should emerge, he or she cannot be said to have won through a credible process,” he wrote.
In a separate post, legal practitioner Waliu Taofik accused some lawyers of overlooking flaws in the election because of political interests.
“Activism dies when politics takes over. Ordinary NBA elections and some activist lawyers are defending what they would have ordinarily challenged if INEC or any other electoral body did it,” he said, adding that he had been unable to vote at the time of his post.
The ECNBA had earlier apologised for the delayed start of voting, attributing it to a coordinated cyberattack on its e-voting platform. The committee said security measures had been activated to restore the system and maintained that the election would remain free, fair and credible despite the disruption.