Why Nigeria’s elections depend on imported technology and what’s making them more expensive

Nigeria’s election technology problem rarely makes headlines until something forces it into the open. INEC recently admitted that it is yet to receive budgetary allocations for the 2027 general elections, even as the commission scrambles to replace Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) devices that were damaged, lost, or never recovered from previous election cycles.

INEC’s national commissioner in charge of voter education and publicity, Mohammed Haruna, disclosed this at a cross-sectoral interactive session organised by the Peering Advocacy and Advancement Centre in Africa, in partnership with Legis360, where he also revealed that the commission’s director of ICT had just returned from China regarding procurement, because not all the BVAS devices used during the last general elections were recovered.

That single detail, a Nigerian election official travelling to China to source replacement voting machines, captures the core of a much bigger story than a funding delay. It is a story about how dependent Nigeria’s democracy has become on imported hardware, and how that dependence is quietly inflating the cost of every election the country holds.

INEC has proposed a total budget of N873.78 billion for the 2027 general elections, a figure that triggered immediate public sticker shock. Haruna pushed back on that framing directly.

“This N800 billion plus sounds humongous, but when you calculate the average cost per voter, it is about $6, which is reasonable for a country such as Nigeria,” he said, adding that “people forget that virtually everything we use is imported.” He pointed specifically to BVAS devices and other election materials as imports, and noted that exchange rate fluctuations also affect these costs.

That last point is the one worth sitting with. Nigeria’s election budget is not just large because elections are inherently expensive to run. It is large because the naira has weakened considerably against the dollar over the past several years, and every BVAS unit, every server, every piece of biometric capture equipment is priced in foreign currency before it ever touches Nigerian soil.

Read also: 2027 elections: INEC required to create permanent database of polling unit results

A device that cost a certain dollar amount in 2019 costs the same number of dollars today, but converting that into naira now requires more than it once did. INEC’s budget has not simply grown with inflation; it has grown with the exchange rate.

BVAS: a genuine technological leap with a costly catch

It is easy to forget how recently BVAS became central to Nigerian elections. Introduced ahead of the 2021 Anambra governorship election and scaled nationally for the 2023 general elections, the device was designed to solve a problem that had plagued Nigerian polls for decades: identity fraud and multiple voting.

By capturing fingerprints and facial data at the point of accreditation, BVAS made it significantly harder for one person to vote in multiple locations or for a polling unit to inflate its turnout figures.

By most technical measures, it has worked. Haruna described INEC’s field logistics and technology performance during the recent Ekiti governorship election as highly successful, noting that the BVAS machines performed optimally with a 98 per cent successful accreditation rate.

He acknowledged minor technical hitches, particularly with the biometric capture of elderly voters due to ageing physical features, though he said INEC’s technical support teams resolved them promptly.

But the catch is structural. BVAS is not manufactured in Nigeria. Every unit, every spare part, every firmware update tied to physical hardware traces back to a supply chain outside the country’s borders, which is precisely why INEC’s ICT director had to travel to China for replacement orders rather than simply placing a domestic purchase order.

“Orders need to be placed, and these things take time,” Haruna said, a quiet acknowledgement that Nigeria’s electoral timeline is now partly hostage to international shipping and manufacturing schedules it does not control.

Why the clock matters as much as the cost for INEC

The funding delay compounds an already tight timeline. Haruna noted that the situation remains within the legal time limit, since the Electoral Act 2026 stipulates that election funds due to the commission for any general election must be released “not later than six months before the next general election.”

Technically compliant, perhaps, but six months is an extraordinarily short runway for international procurement of specialised electoral hardware, especially when devices need to be shipped, tested, configured, and distributed across thousands of polling units nationwide.

Ezenwa Nwagwu, executive director of PAACA, framed the risk bluntly. He warned that delaying election funds forces a dangerous, emergency “fire brigade” approach to national planning, noting that “whenever you create an emergency, corruption is very close behind.” He explained that early financial disbursements were critical because INEC faces tight international procurement timelines and specifically noted that the commission urgently needs to replace essential hardware, including BVAS devices damaged by flooding in Edo during previous election cycles.

That detail, flood-damaged devices in Edo, is a reminder that Nigeria’s election technology problem is not hypothetical or abstract. It is concrete, recurring, and expensive to fix every single cycle because there is no local manufacturing or assembly capacity to draw on for quick replacement.

Could Nigeria build or assemble its own technology for elections?

This is where the conversation needs to move beyond complaining about cost and toward asking a harder question: why hasn’t Nigeria developed even a basic local assembly capacity for its own electoral hardware, more than a decade after biometric voter accreditation first entered the national conversation?

The technical building blocks are not exotic. BVAS devices are, at their core, ruggedised tablets running biometric capture software, fingerprint and facial recognition sensors, and basic networking and storage components, categories where component-level assembly already happens in parts of the world with far less manufacturing infrastructure than Nigeria possesses.

The country has a functioning, if uneven, electronics assembly sector, a growing pool of software and hardware engineering talent, and a clear, recurring, government-guaranteed demand signal in the form of every election cycle. What it currently lacks is the policy decision to treat election technology as a strategic local manufacturing priority rather than a procurement line item to be sourced wherever it is cheapest and fastest.

A local assembly model would not eliminate currency exposure; semiconductors, sensors, and certain specialised components would likely still need to be imported for the foreseeable future. But it would meaningfully reduce the proportion of total cost denominated in foreign currency, shorten replacement timelines from international shipping cycles to domestic ones, and build a base of technical expertise and maintenance capacity within the country itself.

It would also reduce the recurring spectacle of Nigerian officials travelling abroad, mid-electoral-cycle, to source replacement parts for a process as fundamental to national sovereignty as choosing its own leaders.

Until that conversation gains real policy traction, Nigeria’s elections will likely keep following the same pattern: rising costs tied to currency depreciation, tight procurement timelines tied to international shipping, and funding battles that arrive every electoral cycle like clockwork. This is not because elections have become inherently more expensive to run, but because the country has not yet decided to build the tools its democracy depends on.