In preparation for the 2027 general election, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has begun developing its Election Project Plan (EPP). According to a highly placed official within the commission, the planning process is incorporating lessons learned from the 2023 general election. The commission is currently updating its election templates to enhance the efficiency and reliability of its procedures for the upcoming election cycle.
The source also revealed that the formulation includes the production of the 2027 – 2031 Strategic Plan to replace the current 2022 – 2026 Strategic Plan, which ends in December next year. A crucial aspect of this initiative is the creation of a document that will bridge the gap between 2026 and 2027, the year of the general election, a period not covered by the existing 2022-2026 plan. This document will serve as the basis for the 2027 EPP. While the 2022-2026 Strategic Plan focused on institutionalizing the commission’s processes, including capacity building, promoting professionalism, encouraging synergy among departments, and improving resource mobilization over a four-year period, the EPP is specifically tailored to address the needs of a general election.
The EPP was first introduced for the 2015 general election and has since been developed for the 2019 and 2023 elections.
Following the challenges encountered during the 2023 general election, INEC is refining its processes to guarantee smoother operations in future elections. During the 2023 election, which involved managing 93,469,008 registered voters across 176,846 polling units, the commission faced logistical and technical difficulties.
The election required the deployment of over 1.5 million personnel and 182,491 vehicles across Nigeria. One of the main issues reported during the 2023 election was the difficulty in uploading presidential election results to the INEC Result Viewing portal.
Although the system successfully uploaded results for the National Assembly elections, the presidential election results experienced delays due to technical problems. The issue was attributed to a configuration problem that hindered the system from correctly mapping the presidential results, which are countrywide, unlike state-specific elections. The commission resolved the issue by implementing software updates, and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded later in the evening on election day.
