Lagos Thugs, London Protesters and the Chaos Before the Ballot.

On Thursday, November 12, two incidents with red flags for the 2027 elections emerged. In London, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan was detained in his car by a group of protesters. In Lagos, thugs invaded a meeting venue, where supporters of the National Democratic Party (NDC) gathered for a town hall.The Lagos and London incidents are not the same, but together they portend an increasingly fraught electoral season. They are early indicators of where we are headed if nothing is done to arrest them. The grievance in London concerned duplicate entries, AI-generated photographs and fake polling units in INEC’s preliminary voters’ register. For this, the protesters circled Amupitan’s car and prevented him from leaving Chatham House, where he had gone to give a presentation. They got what they wanted: an election umpire embarrassed on a foreign stage.The irony is that Amupitan had already conceded much of their case. On November 9, he disclosed that the commission had removed 1,608,660 invalid registrations and identified 54 people across ten states for possible disciplinary action or prosecution. At Chatham House, he also acknowledged that transmission glitches in the 2023 elections had eroded trust in the commission.I’d say that Amupitan’s candour deserves applause. But a commission that discovers more than 1.6 million invalid entries in its own register has handed its critics a case, and the distrust that follows does not stay confined to demonstrations outside think tanks. The danger is that when citizens doubt the count will be fair, some will conclude that the contest must be settled by other means. That is where London ends and Lagos begins.The kind of political violence Lagos witnessed on Thursday has happened so often that it has become a motif of our existence in this country: an enduring injury, a simmering sadness, an ambient terror. As supporters of the NDC gathered for their town hall, thugs descended on them, destroying property and hunting down those in attendance. As long as this continues, the Nigeria of our dreams will remain a mirage.We have been here before. The 2011 general elections produced one of the deadliest outbreaks of post-election violence in the country’s history. After Goodluck Jonathan defeated Muhammadu Buhari, who would later become president, rioting erupted across major northern cities. Machetes and guns were freely used, and reports put the toll at more than 200 killed and 40,000 displaced. In February 2023, Oyibo Chukwu, the Labour Party’s senatorial candidate in Enugu East, was killed when his convoy was attacked days before the national election.The catalogue is lengthening. The African Centre for Security, Governance and Development counts 70 election-related attacks and 27 deaths so far in 2026. The Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room, drawing on the CLEEN Foundation’s threat assessment, also reports 27 deaths in the first ten months of the year and names campaign rallies and party offices as principal targets. The counts differ in method, but they agree on direction.Nigerians, to their credit, still want to vote. A September survey by Yiaga Africa found that while 84 per cent of Nigerians of voting age are keen to vote in 2027, about 61 per cent worry about their safety because of the risk of election violence. That gap between wanting to vote and fearing to is the first real cost of normalised violence, and it is paid before a single ballot is cast.The course can still be reversed, but only if we stop treating the thug as a freelance nuisance. Researchers who have studied Nigeria’s thug networks link them to elected officials, political financiers and armed groups. Thugs, in other words, have backers, and backers have names.First, the state’s response must be firm and even-handed. It must go beyond the tired quarrel over whether a party obtained a permit for its rally, meeting or town hall. When campaign events become dangerous, turnout on election day falls, because voters who fear the rally will also fear the polling unit.Second, the police must act before the violence, not after it. Those who profit from violence learn that it works, and what works escalates. Political actors are already testing their strategies for 2027, thugs included, and the police must sharpen their intelligence to anticipate them rather than merely count the casualties.Third, accountability must reach the sponsor, not stop at the implementers. Every election season, a handful of young men are paraded before cameras while the men who paid them return to their campaign councils untouched. The National Assembly has toyed for years with an electoral offences commission and has never found the urgency to establish one. Until those behind the violence answers in court for the mayhem the bankrolled, violence will remain what it has long been in our politics: a cheap and dependable campaign expense.Fourth, INEC must win back the argument the London protesters won. Removing 1.6 million invalid entries is a beginning; publishing the cleaned register in a form that citizens and parties can audit, polling unit by polling unit, is the end. Trust does not return through press conferences. It returns when voters can check for themselves that the ghosts are gone and the phantom polling units have been struck off.The two incidents of November 12 must be read together because they feed each other. A register that cannot be trusted makes violence look rational to the desperate; violence that goes unpunished makes a clean register irrelevant to the frightened. Break either link and the cycle weakens. Leave both intact, and 2027 may be settled by those other means, long before INEC announces a single result.Adeola Akinremi is a public policy advisor, strategic communications expert, and the founder and CEO of Hintells, an AI-powered intelligence platform serving global businesses and diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C. He has extensive multilateral experience advising on governance, economic and policy reforms across global markets and can be reached at: adeola@hintells.com