By Dr. Nnaoke Ufere

Election fraud rarely begins at the polling unit. It begins inside political parties. In the case of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), the evidence presented in this article indicates that party leaders and a presidential aspirant worked together to manipulate and steal the party’s presidential nomination before eligible members had the opportunity to cast their ballots in the party’s 25 May 2026 presidential primary election.

Donald Duke’s presidential candidacy exemplifies the political corruption that has undermined Nigeria’s democracy. Based on the documentary and other evidence presented in this article, together with additional audio, video, photographic, electronic, and witness evidence in our possession that cannot be fully reproduced here, it is our opinion that his presidential ticket emerged from a fraudulent primary election for which Donald Duke, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, and those who organized and conducted the primary bear responsibility. For these reasons, we contend that Donald Duke’s nomination should not stand, and we will pursue every lawful avenue to challenge it.

According to the PRP’s own official records, the numbers do not add up.

The membership register certified by National Chairman Hakeem Baba-Ahmed and submitted to INEC on 4 May 2026 listed 7,787 eligible members nationwide. Yet the official state returns recorded 9,976 votes cast, 2,189 more votes than the certified membership. In 19 states, including the Federal Capital Territory, the official results exceeded the number of eligible members.

Gombe State had only 156 registered party members on the 4 May voter rolls, yet the results recorded 1,431 votes, more than nine times the registered membership, approximately 817 percent inflation.

Donald Duke alone was credited with 1,126 of the Gombe votes despite joining only days before the primary, conducting virtually no campaign in the state, being outside Nigeria during voting, and facing aspirants who had spent months organizing party structures and campaigning in states.

Comparable discrepancies appeared across the country. Niger recorded 240 votes from 66 registered members, Jigawa 195 from 117, Bauchi 760 from 475, Kano 421 from 266, and Bayelsa 756 from 480. Abia, Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara, and other states showed similar discrepancies. According to the party’s own figures, approximately 87 percent of the phantom votes were reportedly credited to Donald Duke.

These are not accounting errors. A membership register establishes the maximum number of persons legally eligible and accredited to vote. Vote totals cannot lawfully exceed the number of accredited voters. Yet they did, in numbers that fraudulently and illegally delivered the nomination to Donald Duke.

The scale and geographic spread of the fraud makes a clerical explanation implausible. Across a majority of the states and the Federal Capital Territory, the pattern is consistent with planned, coordinated, systematic vote count manipulation.

That conclusion is corroborated by documentary evidence, party records, certified registers, altered vote tallies, video and audio recordings, electronic communications, and witness testimony from election agents, party officials, and voters. The evidence presented against Donald Duke warrants careful, independent scrutiny.

The controversy deepened the following day. On 26 May 2026, a second membership register surfaced with increased membership figures after it became apparent that the original register could not support the reported vote totals.

The same National Chairman who certified the register submitted to INEC also certified and circulated the revised register, creating the appearance of a calculated cover-up by retroactively expanding the pool of eligible members. Even then, the revised register listed only 9,593 members nationwide, still leaving 383 votes without eligible voters.

Elections can survive administrative mistakes. They cannot survive arithmetic that does not add up or blatant efforts to cover up evidence of systemic fraud.

The surrounding circumstances further undermined confidence in the integrity of the process. Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, brother of the PRP National Chairman, joined the party on or about 29 April 2026 and was subsequently reported to have made a substantial public donation of N50 million.

Donald Duke reportedly joined the PRP only days before the primary after defecting from another party. He was also reported not to have met the party’s deadlines for membership registration and aspirant screening before being cleared to contest. Within days, he emerged as the presidential nominee on a ticket potentially pairing him with Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed as running mate.

As National Chairman, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed supervised the presidential primary, selected and financed state election supervisors, oversaw collation, and declared the winner while his own brother stood to benefit directly as the reported vice presidential candidate. This presented a serious conflict of interest. He should have recused himself. He did not.

The credibility of the process was further undermined by the party’s own admissions. According to three members of the National Executive Committee involved in the primary elections, funds approved to conduct the presidential primary at the state and local government levels did not reach many jurisdictions, forcing state and LGA leaders and election officials to seek funding from presidential aspirants and contestants to conduct the election.

The resulting dependence on candidates to finance the electoral process further corrupted the primary and compromised its integrity. Despite these failures, substantial vote totals were nevertheless recorded and certified from affected states, creating room for votes that may never have been lawfully cast.

Additional irregularities were reported nationwide. Polling locations were moved repeatedly in several states and the Federal Capital Territory, creating confusion for voters. In many locations, INEC officials did not arrive before voting commenced. To avoid disenfranchising members who had assembled, local officials proceeded with voting.

Afterward, INEC officials in several states including Abia, Rivers, and Bayelsa insisted the election be repeated because they had not been present, but many members who had already voted and departed did not return. The disruptions further damaged confidence in the process.

The evidence extends far beyond the manipulated results. It includes video recordings, voice notes, audio recordings of conversations within NEC, WhatsApp messages, voter registration data, official election documents, and witness testimony documenting vote buying, alteration of local government vote totals before transmission to the state level, falsification of records, inflation of vote totals, and efforts by the national office to conceal the fraud.

The evidence also includes altered vote counts at the local government and state levels before national collation in Abuja. Several contestants’ agents walked out after concluding that collation had been irretrievably compromised. When collation resumed the following day, many of those who had objected were no longer present.

Donald Duke was nevertheless declared the winner in 32 of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory despite conducting no visible nationwide campaign and being in the United States during voting.

The PRP, like the APC it vilifies, proves that the arc of democracy bends toward political corruption and electoral fraud. Donald Duke’s fraudulent nomination is nothing more than an outright effort to short-circuit democracy and steal the presidential nomination from the party’s lawfully eligible members.

As the evidence presented in this article indicates, his nomination is the product of what I believe was a manipulated primary process overseen by National Chairman Hakeem Baba-Ahmed. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed’s brother, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, reportedly will be Duke’s running mate, placing the party leadership and the beneficiaries of the process at the center of what I believe is a serious case of political corruption.

The central issue is straightforward. If a presidential nomination emerged from phantom votes, post-election alterations to membership records, manipulated accreditation and collation, procedural irregularities, and a process supervised by a National Chairman who later circulated a different membership register to legitimize vote totals that exceeded the party’s certified membership, the resulting ticket cannot reasonably be presented as credible or democratic.

Donald Duke’s reported response to these allegations was not accountability but more political patronage. Rather than publicly addressing the evidence, he reportedly offered ministerial appointments and reimbursement of campaign expenses to persuade those challenging the primary to abandon their objections rather than confront the allegations themselves. The promise of ministerial appointments is particularly striking given that he has no realistic prospect of winning the presidency. It reflects a level of political delusion that further underscores his unwillingness to confront the allegations against him.

Yet this is the same Donald Duke who, according to Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, travelled to the United States in May 2026 seeking Washington’s support against potential election rigging by President Tinubu in the 2027 general election.

A politician who seeks international support for electoral integrity while attempting to resolve allegations surrounding his own disputed nomination by offering public office as a bribe is not demonstrating democratic accountability.

This case is not simply about one party or candidate. It illustrates a broader problem that has weakened Nigerian democracy for decades. Election fraud begins inside political parties. By the time Nigerians vote in a general election, the selection of those who appear on the ballot may already have been corrupted.

This pattern has damaged Nigeria’s governance. Leaders who rise through rigged nominations and fraudulent elections do not owe their positions to Nigerian voters. They owe them to party leaders, political godfathers, financiers, and power brokers who engineered their rise.

Once in office, their priority is not to govern in the public interest but to protect those relationships, reward loyalists, repay political debts, and preserve the system that put them in power. Competence gives way to patronage. Merit yields to political loyalty. Public resources are diverted from healthcare, education, electricity, infrastructure, and security into sustaining political networks.

A recent nationwide African Mind Journal survey found that 85 percent of Nigerians believe electoral fraud is the root cause of the country’s governance failures. That disillusionment is reflected in declining voter participation. Turnout fell to approximately 27 percent of registered voters in 2023 and, based on the survey findings, is projected to fall below 20 percent in the 2027 general election.

The consequences extend beyond politics. Weak governance, political corruption, and declining public trust have reduced Nigeria’s capacity to provide security and created conditions that ISWAP and Boko Haram exploit to recruit, radicalize and expand, posing risks not only to Nigeria but also to regional stability, U.S. strategic interests in Africa, and international security. Confronting terrorism therefore requires not only military operations but also confronting the political corruption and election fraud that weaken democratic institutions, undermine public confidence, and enable violent extremism.

Why I’m Involved

Political corruption and electoral fraud must end if Nigeria is to survive as a functioning democracy, restore public trust, defeat terrorism, and achieve national prosperity.

The political corruption, abuse of power, and presidential primary fraud I witnessed firsthand within the PRP as a presidential aspirant, coupled with the failure of INEC and the courts to provide timely accountability, convinced me that documenting and reporting election fraud was no longer enough.

I therefore assembled a distinguished team of legal, forensic, investigative, financial, and strategic experts with the expertise, resources, and capacity to investigate, document, expose, and challenge political corruption and electoral fraud through lawful, sustained action. Rarely has such a strong, determined, and well-resourced multinational force been mobilized for this fight in Nigeria.

Our network and mission extend beyond Nigeria. We are supported by influential partners and decision makers in Washington and Brussels who recognize that election fraud is not merely a domestic political problem. When democratic institutions in Nigeria are weakened by political corruption and fraudulent elections, the resulting insecurity and terrorism threaten Nigeria and international security.

Our first battlefront is the presidential primary of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP).

Given the evidence presented in this article, Donald Duke’s candidacy will not go unchallenged. We will contest it, wherever appropriate, through lawful processes and in the court of public opinion throughout the 2027 campaign. In our opinion, a vote for Donald Duke is a vote to legitimize the primary election that produced his candidacy, which we believe was tainted by electoral fraud. It is also, in practical effect, a vote that benefits President Tinubu.

Our campaign does not end with Donald Duke or the PRP. We will challenge every presidential candidate, regardless of political party, whose nomination or election is the product of electoral fraud.

We will do so through investigative reporting, strategic litigation, public advocacy, media engagement, digital platforms, nationwide grassroots mobilization, and sustained engagement with foreign governments, election observers, international organizations, policy institutions, and global media. The objective is not only to expose election fraud after it occurs but to make political corruption and election manipulation carry real legal, political, financial, and reputational consequences.

Nigeria cannot build a stable democracy while tolerating the corruption of internal party nominations. Every manipulated primary weakens the legitimacy of the general election that follows. Governments whose legitimacy is questioned from the moment they assume office struggle to command public confidence, weakening institutions and creating conditions that ISWAP and Boko Haram readily exploit.

We therefore call upon Nigerians and the international community to reject candidates whose political legitimacy rests on electoral fraud. Governments, democratic institutions, election observers, civil society groups, and Nigeria’s international partners should not dismiss election rigging as merely an internal party dispute. It is an assault on democracy, constitutional government, national security, regional stability, and international security.

Democratic legitimacy cannot rest on arithmetic that cannot be reconciled, procedures that cannot be explained, or official records that change after votes have been cast.

The choice before Nigeria is simple. Accept election fraud and accept the corruption, institutional decay, insecurity, and violence that follow. Or defend the integrity of the ballot, insist on accountability, and strengthen the democratic institutions on which peace, stability, economic progress, and national security depend.

In sum, the evidence presented in this article supports the conclusion that Donald Duke’s presidential ticket is the product of a fraudulent presidential primary. The Sword of Damocles hangs over his candidacy, as substantial evidence of electoral fraud continues to cast doubt on its legitimacy. A candidate whose own nomination is burdened by such evidence cannot credibly present himself as a champion of electoral integrity or anti-corruption.

For these reasons, we believe Donald Duke is unfit to govern and lacks the moral authority to challenge a corrupt incumbent when his own claim to political legitimacy rests on a nomination tainted by the very electoral fraud he claims to oppose. Rewarding electoral fraud with the presidency would further erode Nigeria’s democracy.

Dr. Nnaoke Ufere is a Harvard-trained venture capitalist, entrepreneur, author, and public intellectual. He contested for the 2027 presidential nomination of the Peoples Redemption Party and is the author of Covenant With Nigerians: Reversing Our Country’s Decline. He writes from the United States.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Guardian.