Party's interim chairman says absent polling agents — not electronic transmission — cost LP its legal battle after the last general election; union reintegration now underway

Nigeria's Labour Party has firmly distanced itself from growing calls to boycott the 2027 general elections, declaring that it will not follow other opposition parties down that path while it still has unfinished business from 2023 to attend to.

Interim National Chairman Senator Nenadi Usman made the position clear on Saturday in Abuja, speaking on the sidelines of the unveiling of the party's new e-registration portal — a milestone she framed as part of a broader rebuilding effort ahead of the next electoral cycle.

Her remarks land at a politically charged moment. The Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) has threatened to mobilise opposition parties to shun the 2027 elections unless lawmakers revisit contested provisions in the newly passed Electoral Act 2026 (Amendment). The threat has sharpened divisions within Nigeria's opposition over how to respond to the legislation.

But Usman was unequivocal: the Labour Party will not be joining that chorus.

"Every political party has its peculiarities," she said. “What bothers another political party may not be what is bothering the Labour Party at the moment. We are not going to adopt a bandwagon effect — because we are the workers' party.”

In explaining the party's priorities, Usman pointed to a failure that she said proved more damaging than any technological shortcoming — the absence of Labour Party agents at polling units across the country during the 2023 presidential election.

When LP contested the result in court, it found itself unable to produce the physical documentation needed to substantiate its claims of victory. The critical instrument at the centre of the problem was Form EC8A, the official result sheet signed by party agents at each polling unit. Without agents present to collect and authenticate those forms, the party's legal case effectively collapsed.

"If you remember, in 2023, when we claimed that we won the election, when it was time for us to print out our evidence in court, we could not," Usman said. “We didn't have agents in all the polling units signing and bringing it out for us to use as proof that we actually got what we said we had.”

The admission is a candid one. Rather than attributing the 2023 defeat primarily to electoral manipulation or the limitations of the Independent National Electoral Commission's iREV live-transmission system — grievances that have dominated opposition discourse — LP's leadership is directing accountability inward.

"We don't want to depend on the iREV and say that we will not work on our grassroots support," Usman said. “We are not going to repeat the 2023 mistake.”

Central to the party's recovery plan is the reintegration of organised labour into its operational backbone. Usman revealed that the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) — the institutional pillars on which the Labour Party was originally founded — had been effectively shut out of party operations in the lead-up to the 2023 elections, with damaging consequences for field coordination and agent deployment.

"The institutional members of our great party, the Nigeria Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress, were completely blocked out," she said. “But now that we have come to correct that error and have our teeming members in the unions working together with us, I believe that we are going to have people signing the Form EC8A. And with that, we will go very far.”

The reintegration of the unions is significant. The NLC and TUC together represent millions of workers across the country, with existing organisational networks that extend into nearly every local government area — precisely the grassroots reach that Labour Party agents lacked in 2023.

On the question of the electoral act and IPAC's boycott threat, Usman's position was measured but firm. She did not directly attack the council's concerns, but made clear that LP's calculus is different.

"Different political parties have different issues bothering them," she said. “For us, we will face what is bothering us and try to fix it so that, by 2027, we will be a better party.”

She added that the party would not stand in the way of those who choose to sit out the election, but would not follow suit. “If any political party feels that they are so aggrieved and do not want to participate come 2027, honestly, we are not going to stop them.”

The declaration signals that, whatever course other opposition parties chart toward 2027, the Labour Party intends to be on the ballot — and, if its chairman's promises hold, better prepared than it was the last time.