Two women are on Nigeria's 2027 presidential ballot. Most published lists of the field leave both of them out

INEC's signed final list of candidates for the 2027 presidential election - the commission's own document, downloaded from inecnigeria.org and read here, not a newspaper's reprint of it - carries eighteen presidential tickets. Entry 11, on page 2 of three, reads "OKWORI ADA ELIZABETH FREDRICK", age 48, female, against the NDP, with Chukwuemeka Uchenna Anthony, 48, male, as running mate. Her filed qualifications are printed as FSLC SSCE HND ACCOUNTANCY. Every page is signed by Rose Oriaran-Anthony, Secretary of the Commission.

This report exists because that entry is missing almost everywhere else. The widely-circulated lists of the 2027 field run to sixteen names, and the two they drop are the only two women contesting the presidency: Okwori for the National Democratic Party and Okereke Nkem Esther for the National Rescue Movement. Vero's own reporting carried the same sixteen until we opened the commission's list and counted.

We are not able to say why the two are missing, and we are not going to guess. The published summaries do not explain their own arithmetic, and a list can lose entries for reasons as dull as a truncated table. What can be said is the shape of the error: it is not random. Eighteen candidates are on the ballot, two are women, and the two most commonly absent from the coverage are the same two.

INEC's register of political parties adds the fact that makes her candidacy unusual even within the field. It gives the National Democratic Party's national chairman as "Hon. Ada Elizabeth Fredrick Okwori (By Court Order)". She is both the party's chairman and its presidential candidate, and the commission records that she holds the chairmanship by order of a court rather than by the party's own process.

That phrase is rarer than it sounds. Of the 22 chairmanships on INEC's register, exactly three carry "By Court Order": the National Democratic Party, the Action Alliance and the Nigeria Democratic Congress, which is Peter Obi's platform. Being chairman and candidate at once is commoner - four parties on this ballot are led by their own presidential or vice-presidential candidate - but the combination of both, a contested chairmanship and a presidential nomination in the same hands, belongs to her and to Rufai Omo-Aje of the Action Alliance alone.

The register also frames how small a field eighteen is. Nigeria has 22 registered political parties; four of them - APGA, the NNPP, Accord and the Youth Party - field no presidential candidate at all in 2027.

Beyond the commission's two documents we could establish very little. We found no reliably sourced biography for Okwori, no account of the litigation that produced her chairmanship, no record of prior elected office and no campaign material we could attribute with confidence. Her filed qualifications - a first school leaving certificate, a senior secondary certificate and a higher national diploma in accountancy - are the fullest description of her that any document we hold provides.

The picture on this report is her line in INEC's list, because we hold no photograph of her that we can attribute with certainty, and a face wrongly matched to a name on a national ballot is worse than no face at all. What is documented is precise and thin: a name, an age, a running mate, a diploma in accountancy, a party chairmanship granted by a court, and a place on the ballot that most of the country's published lists of that ballot do not show.

What this rests on

Two INEC documents read directly: the signed final list of candidates and the commission's register of political parties. The count of eighteen candidates, the two women, the three court-ordered chairmanships and the four parties fielding no candidate were all counted off those two documents.

What this does not establish

It does not establish why published summaries of the field omit her, and we offer no explanation for that. It does not establish anything about her biography, career or prior office, none of which we could document. It does not establish what the litigation behind her chairmanship concerned or who the other parties to it were. It does not establish that the omission from press lists was deliberate or that it disadvantaged her.