A Primary That Failed Arithmetic: How the PRP Presidential Nomination Was Compromised

A Primary That Failed Arithmetic: How the PRP Presidential Nomination Was Compromised

The Ufere2027 Presidential Campaign is compelled to bring before the Nigerian public a set of facts that no amount of political spin can dissolve, because they rest not on opinion but on arithmetic.

The People Redemption Party conducted its presidential primary under guidelines issued by its own leadership just one day before the 25 May election. Those guidelines were explicit: only members whose names appeared on the official membership register submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission as of 4 May 2026 were eligible to vote. That register was the governing document. It was the single source of truth agreed by all parties before a single ballot was cast.

Measured against that register, the declared results collapse on contact.

For example, in Gombe, a register of 348 members produced an astonishing 1,431 votes, a 311 percent inflation, with more than 1,000 phantom ballots appearing from nowhere. In Bauchi, a register of 593 members produced 760 votes, 167 more ballots than there were people permitted to cast them. In Kwara, 55 registered members somehow produced 82 votes, an excess of nearly 50 percent. These are only a few examples from the results released so far. Collation at the party’s National Headquarters was itself halted amid widespread irregularities, raising even deeper concerns about the integrity of the overall process.

Across these states, 996 registered members produced 2,273 votes. That is 1,277 ballots that correspond to no eligible voter on the party’s own INEC-approved list. More than half of the total declared vote did not lawfully exist.

These are not rounding errors. They are not the product of enthusiasm or high turnout. A register is a ceiling. Turnout cannot exceed 100 percent of the people allowed to vote. Every vote beyond the register is, by definition, a vote that should never have been counted.

The phantom votes were not random. They broke overwhelmingly, in state after state, in favour of a single aspirant, Mr. Donald Duke, a man who joined the People Redemption Party only in the days immediately before the primary, having defected from another platform on the eve of the exercise. The pattern is consistent and lopsided enough to demand an explanation the party has so far refused to give.

The questions deepen when one considers the candidate himself. Mr. Duke did not campaign for a single day of this contest. By available accounts, he was outside the country while the election was being conducted. He joined the People Redemption Party in secrecy after the relevant deadlines had already been breached. He openly offered to refund rival aspirants the costs they had incurred if they would step aside and allow him to emerge as a consensus candidate.

By contrast, Dr. Nnaoke Ufere actively campaigned across the country. He sponsored voter registration and member engagement efforts in all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, funded a nationwide women’s mobilization programme, and provided logistics support that enabled grassroots members to attend events and hear his agenda for the nation directly. A candidate who made that level of visible investment in party mobilization being defeated by a candidate who neither campaigned nor participated openly in the process raises serious questions that demand credible answers.

A man who does not campaign, who is absent during the vote, who enters the party after the gates have closed, and who seeks to purchase the withdrawal of rivals, does not ordinarily sweep a primary unless the result was never going to depend on votes in the first place.

Well-informed party insiders allege that this outcome was engineered, that the inflation was not accidental disorder but a deliberate design to deliver the nomination to a preferred candidate in service of a prearranged ticket. Those same insiders point to reported plans for Mr. Duke to run alongside Senator Datti Baba-Ahmed, younger brother of the National Chairman, Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed. We do not state these motives as proven fact. We state them as serious allegations raised by people positioned to know, allegations that the party’s leadership now has an obligation to answer rather than ignore.

This campaign does not raise these concerns from rumour alone. We are in possession of written and recorded evidence, including voice recordings, in which party officials charged with conducting this very primary solicited payments running into millions of Naira in exchange for delivering votes to Dr. Nnaoke Ufere. There are also several documented instances of contestants allegedly paying over N500,000 to PRP state chairmen to procure votes, pointing to a broader pattern of inducement and coordinated interference in the electoral process.

Dr. Nnaoke Ufere, a Harvard-educated venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and globally renowned anti-corruption expert, refused every such demand without exception. He has spent his public life as a voice against corruption in Nigeria’s institutions, and he was not prepared to secure a nomination by becoming part of the very system he has consistently opposed. That refusal appears to explain why the manufactured votes flowed elsewhere. 

The lesson of this primary is stark: the aspirant who would not buy votes was defeated by votes that were bought or fabricated. This evidence has been preserved and will be made available in full to the party’s appropriate organs, the Independent National Electoral Commission, and the relevant anti-corruption authorities. 

Should the party fail to act decisively and lawfully to correct these grave irregularities, the campaign will pursue every available legal and regulatory remedy to protect the integrity of the process, defend the rights of lawful participants, and ensure accountability for those responsible.

What is not in dispute is the wreckage the exercise left behind. INEC officials were absent or severely delayed across multiple locations. In the Federal Capital Territory, members waited roughly five hours before any process began. The campaign has further received reports that, in the late hours, organized groups armed with knives were brought to a polling location and used to intimidate voters who remained. If confirmed, this transforms the exercise from administrative failure into a grave case of electoral violence requiring immediate investigation by the party and the relevant authorities.

Where returning officers acted to save the process, their work was later cancelled, disenfranchising voters who had already endured the wait and gone home. The party itself admitted that funds budgeted and approved for the conduct of the election never reached many states and local government areas. This was not a peripheral lapse. The remittance of those funds was a core duty of the National Chairman, Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, and the failure to discharge that responsibility was a direct cause of the delays, disorganization, and in some places the collapse of voting.

A funding vacuum of this kind does not remain empty. It created the opening for contestants to step in and provide money to presiding officers and state party officials for food, accommodation, and logistics, precisely the conditions under which the independence of an electoral process is fatally compromised. This is not speculation. State chairmen and primary election committee chairpersons appointed by Dr. Baba-Ahmed complained openly in real time on the party’s official WhatsApp group. By their own contemporaneous accounts, the exercise was a disaster. When the consequences became undeniable, the National Chairman walked out of the collation centre at the party’s national headquarters and did not return until the crowd had dispersed, abandoning the very process he was constitutionally charged to supervise.

A nomination cannot be salvaged by quietly substituting a new, more convenient membership list after the fact. We are aware that a different list is now being circulated. Let us be direct. The governing register is the 4 May list submitted to INEC and distributed to the states.

Instead, what is now being presented is the Baba-Ahmed list dated 25 May, containing 12,378 members, compared to 7,787 on the INEC-approved 4 May register. That is an unexplained addition of 4,591 members, representing a 59 percent increase after the official rules had already been set and the governing register established.

It cannot be changed after polling simply because the declared figures expose what they expose. Any attempt to retroactively swap the register is not a correction. It is a second irregularity layered on the first.

Accordingly, the Ufere2027 Campaign demands:

1. The immediate suspension of collation and any declaration of a presidential nominee from this process.

2. A full forensic audit of every vote transmitted from every state and local government area, measured against the 4 May INEC-approved register and no other.

3. Immediate publication of complete state-by-state and LGA-by-LGA accreditation and voting figures.

4. An independent investigation into the concentration of excess votes in favour of one aspirant.

5. An immediate investigation by the party and the appropriate authorities into the reported acts of armed intimidation at the FCT polling location.

6. The nullification of all results in which votes exceeded the eligible register.

7. A fresh presidential primary, properly supervised and in full compliance with the party’s own rules.

8. Full accountability for every person responsible for the administrative failure, missing funds, reported violence, vote-buying, and manipulation of the result.

The People Redemption Party was built on a tradition of principled, accountable politics. That tradition is not honoured by a primary in which the votes outnumber the voters. We call on the National Chairman and the National Working Committee to act transparently and immediately to restore the integrity of this process. The alternative is to leave the legitimacy of the PRP’s presidential nomination permanently in doubt and to leave aggrieved stakeholders no choice but to pursue every legal, regulatory, and political remedy available.

The numbers are public now. They can be explained, or they can be answered for. They cannot be wished away.

Signed:

Ishaq Alhassan

Executive Director, Ufere2027 Presidential Campaign

Authorized Representative of Dr. Nnaoke Ufere

Presidential Aspirant, People Redemption Party (PRP).