Recently, political parties struggled to upload candidate profiles before the July 2026 deadline, primarily due to internal factional crises, poor technical infrastructure, and communication breakdowns with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
These challenges forced the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) to appeal for a deadline extension, moving the cutoff from July 11 to July 14, 2026. The bottleneck exposed severe structural IT and administrative failures within party secretariats.
Investigation by BusinessDay reveals that internal splits within parties like the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP) created chaos. Multiple factions fought over who controlled the official INEC portal access codes, delaying the nomination uploads.
Many party secretariats lacked robust internet bandwidth and modern IT hardware. When the high-volume data rush hit the INEC Candidate Nomination Portal, weak digital infrastructure at party headquarters collapsed under the strain. Communication gaps emerged between state and national party secretariats regarding who actually won local primaries. In several instances, the portal blocked uploads because data fields contradicted INEC’s own field reports on where primaries were successfully held.
