…name submitted to INEC
By Sanni Abdullahi
The Peoples Democratic Party led by former Minister, Kabiru Turaki said it has submitted the name of former President Goodluck Jonathan as its presidential candidate for the 2027 general elections after being denied access to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s electronic nomination portal.
Speaking to reporters in Abuja on Friday night, the faction’s spokesperson, Comrade Ini Ememobong, said the party was left with no choice but to deliver the nomination physically to INEC headquarters.
“We manually submitted the name of former President Goodluck Jonathan to INEC as the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party under the leadership of Kabiru Turaki,” Ememobong said.
The ‘factional’ PDP Spokesperson continued: “This became necessary after INEC refused to provide our group with the access codes required to upload the candidate’s name electronically on the portal.”
According to Ememobong, the Turaki-led group had made several attempts in the days leading up to the deadline to obtain login credentials for INEC’s candidate nomination portal, but received no response. He described the manual submission as a step to protect the party’s constitutional right to field a candidate and to avoid disenfranchisement.
INEC has not yet issued a public statement on the claim. The commission introduced the electronic nomination portal in recent election cycles to streamline the submission of candidate names by political parties and to reduce errors and late filings.
Access codes are typically issued to the recognized leadership of each party as recorded by INEC.
The development has further deepened the leadership crisis within the PDP, Nigeria’s main opposition party. Two parallel executives have been laying claims to the party structure ahead of 2027, with the Turaki-led faction insisting it is the authentic leadership recognized by party stakeholders.
The rival faction has also been engaging INEC over party matters, including candidate nominations and congresses.
Jonathan, who served as Nigeria’s president from 2010 to 2015, has not publicly confirmed whether he will contest in 2027. He lost the 2015 presidential election and has since kept a low profile in partisan politics, focusing instead on peace mediation across Africa.
His name, however, continues to surface in discussions within PDP circles as the party seeks a unifying figure to challenge the ruling party in the next presidential race.
Political and legal analysts have maintained that the manual submission could set up a legal and administrative test for INEC, which must decide which PDP faction’s nomination it will recognize if multiple names are submitted. The Electoral Act requires the commission to publish the list of nominated candidates after verifying submissions from parties.
Ememobong has urged INEC to treat the submission fairly and to ensure that internal party disputes do not prevent eligible parties from participating in the 2027 elections.
“The will of millions of PDP members should not be shut out because of a technical access issue,” he said. “We have done what the law allows by submitting manually, and we expect INEC to act in line with its mandate of impartiality.”
With just few months to the 2027 general elections, the struggle for PDP leadership has already generated tension across party lines. For the PDP, the dispute over platform control and now over candidate nomination could shape whether the party goes into the election united or fractured.
INEC is expected to publish the list of candidates submitted by all political parties to the public in a matter of weeks.
