The Nigerians in the United Kingdom (NIUK) Community posted the results of its elections on Saturday, but the inconsistent figures and the announcement’s timing have since raised suspicion of foul play.

The NIUK community is a body of Nigerians living in the United Kingdom. It was officially registered in 2022. The goal of the community is to help Nigerians relocating to the UK have a safe and easy integration into the country.

According to the community’s constitution, an executive body is elected every two years. The electoral committee of the body was open to registered financial and non-financial members of the community.

In the election result that was released on Sunday, 21 members of the community contested for various positions.

According to the result posted on X by the electoral committee, 1,421 community members registered to vote while 414 voters were recorded — a low turnout. The conflict in the result, however, was in the number of votes cast as against the number of voters.

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The community announced that 414 voters polled a total number of 507 votes. Numbers that beat commonsense.

Many members of the community and other Nigerians who monitored the elections have called out the electoral committee for its shoddy job.

Others also condemned the time the results were released.

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For better understanding, the United Kingdom’s time zone is Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT), while Nigeria is GMT +1, meaning that Nigeria is an hour ahead of the UK.

The election result, in Nigerian time, was released by 1:24 am Nigerian time, that is, 12:24 am UK time. For both countries, the results arrived into the night when many community members were expected to be asleep, raising further concerns about the credibility of the election process and those results.

In its defence, the NIUK Electoral Committee said there was a typographical error in the result. It then blamed the inconsistency on the two platforms employed to conduct the election — Google Form and Election Runner.

“For election runner, voters were mandated to rank all the 21 candidates while for Google form, voters were allowed to vote for 1 to 7 candidates. That means we had voters who voted for 3 candidates and some 1 or 2 or 7,” NIUK said on X.

This clarification arrived 11 hours late.

More Nigerians reacted to the NIUK Electoral Committee’s clarification, faulting its methods.

Ik Osmond, an Abuja resident, noted that the majority of registered voters “were not allowed” to vote.

Real estate consultant and UK resident Wales Gbadamosi asked for an easy and more transparent method of voting.

The NIUK has been a significant contributor to Nigeria’s socio-politics, especially in recent times. For instance, the community demanded in 2024 that Nigeria allow its members to participate in Nigeria’s elections. The bill to allow Nigerians in the diaspora to participate in Nigerian elections has passed the second reading in the House of Representatives.