Babayola M. Toungo
There are moments in the life of a democracy when an apparently ordinary political event acquires a significance far greater than the event itself. The reported endorsement of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 2027 re-election bid by more than 600 senior academics from public universities across Northern Nigeria is one such moment. It is not merely about professors endorsing a politician. It is about what happens when the university – one of society’s last institutional refuges for independent inquiry – begins to look indistinguishable from the political establishment, while some of those academics may subsequently be invited to referee the very election in which their preferred candidate is a contestant. That is where the matter becomes uncomfortable.
The reported endorsement followed a closed-door meeting convened by Ibrahim Masari, Special Adviser to the President on Political Matters, at the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Centre in Kaduna. Several northern governors and federal ministers were reportedly present. The Vice-Chancellor of Kaduna State University, Professor Abdullahi Musa, who read the communiqué, later explained that the academics had examined data on such issues as education, infrastructure, investment and agriculture before arriving at their-recommendation.
There is, of course, nothing illegal about an academic having a political opinion. Professors are citizens before they are professors. They possess the same constitutional right as every other Nigerian to support, criticise or reject a political candidate. But something fundamentally different happens when hundreds of academics publicly constitute themselves as a collective political constituency and endorse a sitting president seeking re-election.
The question is no longer whether they have a right to their opinions. They do. The question is what that public intervention does to the credibility of institutions in which the Nigerian public has placed considerable trust. And here lies the real danger.
Nigeria’s electoral history has taught us that elections are not won or lost only at polling units. They are also won or lost in the court of public confidence. A disputed result becomes explosive when citizens believe that the men and women entrusted with administering or declaring the election are not neutral. Electoral legitimacy is therefore not merely a mathematical proposition. It is also a question of institutional confidence.
The Electoral Act recognises this principle explicitly. Election officials, including Returning Officers, are required to swear to an oath of neutrality and to discharge their duties impartially, without fear or favour. INEC’s own election manual equally requires Returning and Collation Officers to maintain fairness and neutrality and specifically prohibits conduct demonstrating preference for a political party or candidate. This is why the controversy surrounding the professors cannot simply be waved away as another quarrel between political parties.
The African Democratic Congress has already asked INEC to reconsider the appointment of academics who have openly taken partisan positions as Returning and Collation Officers. Its argument is straightforward: if a person publicly endorses a candidate and is subsequently appointed to a position where he or she may be involved in determining that candidate’s electoral fortunes, the problem is not necessarily proof of actual bias; it is the appearance of a conflict of interest. That distinction is fundamental.
A referee does not become impartial merely because he promises to be impartial after publicly declaring which team he wants to win. In politics, perception is often part of reality. Suppose Professor A publicly endorses Candidate X. Months later, Professor A is appointed to collate results involving Candidate X. Candidate X wins. Even if every figure announced by Professor A is mathematically correct, the losing candidate now has an obvious political argument: why should somebody who publicly campaigned for the winner have been placed in a position of electoral responsibility? And suppose Candidate X loses. His supporters could raise precisely the same objection.
This is why the issue should not be reduced to whether these professors are personally honest. That is neither demonstrable nor relevant. Institutions are designed precisely because democracies cannot depend upon assumptions about the personal virtue of individual office-holders. The more fundamental question is whether the architecture of the electoral process protects itself against reasonable suspicion. The answer ought to be yes.
Indeed, the 2026 Electoral Act reportedly goes further than the earlier framework by expressly providing that no person who is a member of a political party or who has openly expressed support for a candidate should be appointed as an election official. If that provision applies to the 2027 electoral process, then the controversy is no longer merely philosophical. It becomes a question of statutory compliance.
But there is another institution standing in the dock here: the Nigerian university. For generations, the university has represented the idea that truth should be pursued independently of power. The professor was supposed to be the person who could stand before government and say: your statistics are wrong; your policy is failing; your assumptions are defective; your argument does not survive scrutiny. That independence is not an ornamental privilege. It is the intellectual foundation of the university.
Of course, academics should participate in public affairs. Universities should not become monasteries of political silence. Scholars have every right to enter politics, contest elections, advise governments and defend policies they genuinely believe will advance society. But there is a profound difference between scholarly criticism of government policy and the collective political endorsement of a candidate for re-election. The former is the university speaking to power. The latter risks making the university appear to speak for power.
That distinction becomes even more troubling when the gathering itself is convened by a political appointee of the president whose re-election is subsequently endorsed. Reports say the meeting was held behind closed doors and was attended by governors, ministers and other political figures. The optics are therefore difficult to ignore. A government official convenes academics. Political office-holders attend. Academics deliberate on the administration’s record. Academics subsequently endorse the president. Then some of the same academic community may, under Nigeria’s electoral system, be called upon to serve as Returning or Collation Officers. One does not need to allege a conspiracy to recognise the institutional problem.
Democracy is weakened not only by proven manipulation but also by institutions that permit avoidable doubts to accumulate. This is the deeper ideological tragedy of Nigerian politics: the progressive language of expertise can so easily become the conservative language of establishment. Statistics, research and academic credentials can be mobilised not merely to interrogate power but to confer intellectual legitimacy upon it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with academics concluding, after examining evidence, that a government has performed well. There is equally nothing inherently wrong with them saying so publicly. But when scholarship becomes a collective instrument for political endorsement, the public has every right to ask whether the language of objective inquiry has been transformed into the vocabulary of political advocacy.
And there is another danger. If 600 professors can collectively endorse the incumbent today, what happens when another 600 professors endorse his opponent tomorrow? Does scholarship become a referendum? Do universities become electoral blocs? Do competing political camps begin recruiting professors in the same way they recruit delegates, influencers and religious leaders? That would be a dangerous road. The university should be a marketplace of competing ideas, not another battlefield in the struggle for political patronage.
The same principle applies to INEC. The Commission should not wait until after the 2027 election for political parties to challenge the credibility of its personnel. It should establish and publish clear conflict-of-interest criteria before appointments are made. Where an individual has publicly and recently endorsed a candidate whose election the individual may be required to administer, collate or declare, INEC should have a transparent procedure for determining whether that person should be excluded from the relevant assignment. This is not punishment. It is institutional hygiene
The objective should not be to silence professors. Nor should it be to criminalise political opinion. It should be to prevent a situation in which an election is conducted correctly but its result is distrusted because the people responsible for important stages of the process had already declared their political preference.
Nigeria has been here before in different forms. Our elections have suffered enough from allegations of rigging, manipulation, compromised institutions and political interference. The country does not need to manufacture another source of distrust.
The 2027 election will be fought fiercely. Candidates will make claims. Parties will mobilise. Social media will become a battlefield of competing narratives. Every disputed figure will be amplified. Every administrative error will acquire political meaning. In such an environment, the electoral umpire must be cleaner than clean. The university must be freer than politics. And the professor who chooses to become an open partisan must understand that political freedom carries institutional consequences. Nobody should tell an academic whom to support.
But neither should anybody pretend that publicly choosing a side has no bearing on whether that person should later be entrusted with the responsibility of calling the game.
The issue, therefore, is not whether the 600 professors are entitled to support Tinubu. They are. The issue is whether Nigeria can afford to have people who have publicly chosen a candidate subsequently placed in positions where their professional authority could help determine the legitimacy of that candidate’s victory.
That is the question INEC must answer now, not after the ballot boxes have been opened and the results declared. Because democracy does not merely require a referee. It requires a referee whom both sides can reasonably believe is not wearing somebody else’s jersey.