Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Olisa Agbakoba, has advised media organisations to base their election winner projections on results published on the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Result Viewing Portal (IReV), stressing the need for proper attribution.
Agbakoba gave the advice on Wednesday while speaking on Arise Television about INEC’s recent warning against the independent declaration of election results by media organisations.
The former Nigerian Bar Association president maintained that although the media could project election winners, such projections must be supported by verifiable figures from the electoral process and clearly attributed to their sources.
His comments followed a caution issued on October 6 by INEC Chairman, Joash Amupitan, who warned media platforms against announcing results independently.
Amupitan said the Electoral Act reserved the authority to declare election results for the commission and urged news organisations to refrain from publishing privately collated figures as official outcomes.
“Resist the declaration of privately collated results because under the Electoral Act, the authority to declare result rests exclusively with the commission,” the INEC chairman said.
He also called on media organisations to establish fact-checking desks, deploy digital forensic tools and verify election-related information with INEC before publication.
Speaking on the matter, Agbakoba said media projections should reflect the results emerging from the established electoral process rather than figures compiled independently without a verifiable basis.
“You cannot say, ‘I’m projecting Agbakoba as a winner’ without attributing. There must be attribution,” he said.
To illustrate his point, Agbakoba referred to the practice of international media organisations, including CNN, which project election winners based on available results and communicate the basis for their assessments to audiences.
“If you watch international media… when CNN projected Obama, CNN went to the (magic) board. ‘We project Obama as the winner based on the outcomes,’” he said.
He warned that media organisations should not make election projections arbitrarily, insisting that the figures used must originate from the recognised electoral process.
“The key here is that you can’t go on a frolic of your own and say here are the results,” he added.
Agbakoba further pointed to INEC’s result documentation framework, which runs from Form EC8A to Form EC8E, as the established channel through which election results are recorded and collated.
His position comes amid renewed debate over the role of the media in reporting election results and projecting winners, following INEC’s insistence that the formal declaration of results remains the commission’s responsibility.
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