A court ordered Peter Obi's party struck from the register; INEC reopened its candidate portal anyway

INEC’s own final list of candidates for the 2027 presidential election - not a newspaper’s reprint of it, but the signed commission document, which we downloaded from inecnigeria.org and read - carries this candidacy on page 3 of three. The entry is printed surname first, as "OBI PETER GREGORY", against NDC, age 65, with MUSA MOHAMMED RABIU KWANKWASO (69) as running mate. The list is signed on every page by Rose Oriaran-Anthony, Secretary of the Commission. It names eighteen presidential candidates, two more than most published summaries of the field. The qualifications filed with the commission are printed as St. Augustines Primary School; Anambra Christ the King College (C.K.C); WASC; UNN B.A..

For the 2023 result, we went to INEC’s own 526-page Report of the 2023 General Election rather than to press tallies. The commission’s live site no longer serves it - the file 404s - so we retrieved it from an Internet Archive capture of INEC’s own URL, which leaves it INEC’s document. Table 9.6, at printed page 163, gives the Labour Party’s vote by geopolitical zone: 1,415,557 in the North Central, 315,107 in the North East, 350,182 in the North West, 1,960,589 in the South East, 1,210,675 in the South South and 849,423 in the South West.

Those six numbers are INEC’s. The total they make is ours: they sum to 6,101,533, which is the figure reported as Obi’s national vote. We separate the two deliberately, because the commission never prints a national total for him anywhere in the report, and an arithmetic step we performed is not the same class of fact as a line we read. The same table shows why the zonal picture mattered: 89.62 per cent in the South East against 5.31 per cent in the North West.

One thing INEC’s report does not contain is a list of the states any candidate won, and we could not obtain the document that would carry it. The commission has never published the 2023 national declaration as a downloadable file; a sweep of every archived PDF on its domain turns up declarations for 2013, 2014 and 2015 but nothing for the 2023 presidential result. Its result-viewing portal is effectively dead - the interface still loads, but the server it calls no longer resolves in DNS - and what it held were per-polling-unit scans, not a summary.

On his governorship, the most-quoted figures about Anambra are the ones we could least verify. The handover claims now circulating - a net balance of some N86.67bn, foreign investments of $156m - exist in press reproductions; neither outlet hosts a scan, and Anambra’s own document library begins in 2020, so the 2006-2014 accounts are not online. Those figures stay unverified here. What we could retrieve is the federal record of the same period: the Debt Management Office’s table of state external debt as at 31 December 2013 puts Anambra at $30,323,574.40, and its domestic debt table for the same date puts the state at N3,025,797,046.67 - among the lowest domestic debt stocks of the 36 states. Obi handed over on 17 March 2014, about ten weeks later.

Start with the judgment. A Federal High Court in Abuja, per Justice Mohammed Umar, directed INEC to cancel the registration of the Nigeria Democratic Congress and to remove its name from the register of political parties. The stated ground was that INEC had failed to comply with the Constitution and the Electoral Act in registering the party — in effect, that the NDC had never been validly registered at all.

Set against that the timeline. INEC registered the NDC on 5 February 2026, and the party ratified Peter Obi as its 2027 presidential candidate on 29 May 2026. The court's order therefore does not land on a dormant shell; it lands on the platform of a declared presidential candidate who left the Labour Party for it, at a point when his candidacy was already public.

Then the contradiction sharpens. After the nullification, the NDC's national leadership announced that Obi's name had been uploaded to INEC's nomination portal, and reporting indicates INEC restored the party's access to that portal. An electoral commission under a court order to strike a party from the register was, at the same time, processing that party's presidential candidate through its own systems.

This is a live inconsistency, not a settled outcome, and the distinction matters in Nigeria more than almost anywhere. Party-registration and candidate-eligibility cases routinely move between the Federal High Court and the Court of Appeal, and portal access is granted, halted and restored at different stages of that journey. The ADC faced a parallel deregistration order in the same period that the Court of Appeal later voided — a reminder that a first-instance order is a stage, not a full stop.

Vero places the four dates on one line — registration, candidate ratification, court nullification, portal reopening — because laid out that way they show a conflict between a judicial order and an administrative act that no single press report captured. What the timeline does not show is a resolution: the suit number was not confirmed, the appellate status is open, and the reopening may reflect a stay or a later order we have not retrieved.

So the report stops where the record stops. It does not say the NDC is finally deregistered, that Obi is disqualified, or that INEC acted in bad faith. It says two official actions point in opposite directions at the same moment, and that until the appellate courts speak, the status of a major candidate's party is genuinely unsettled.

What this rests on

INEC’s own election report, read on the page, for the zonal vote; the Debt Management Office’s own published tables for the Anambra debt position. The candidacy, the printed name, the age, the running mate and the filed qualifications rest on INEC’s own signed final list, read on the page. The Federal High Court judgment (Justice Umar) and INEC's registration/portal records. Verify via the certified judgment and INEC's register of political parties.

What this does not establish

INEC prints no national total for any candidate; the 6,101,533 figure is our addition of the commission’s six zonal numbers, not a line we read. No document establishes which states he won. The Anambra handover figures - the N86.67bn balance and the investment sums - are not established by any record we hold, and we did not confirm them. The 2023 election petition judgment is in our hands only as an unsearchable scan hosted by a third party and watermarked by an opposing legal team, so we quote nothing from it. It does not establish that the NDC is finally deregistered, that Obi is disqualified, or that the ruling survived appeal - the suit number and appellate status were not confirmed. It does not prove INEC acted in bad faith; the reopening may reflect a stay or later order we have not retrieved.