The System As Designed

Monday, 23 February 2026

Saturday's election results are in. The new rules worked exactly as written.

The first election under the new Electoral Act happened on Saturday. APC won five of six FCT area councils. Turnout was 15%. INEC uploaded 93% of results to IReV by Sunday afternoon. By every metric the Act was built to measure, it worked.

That's today's through-line. Not broken institutions — functioning ones. The electoral framework isn't failing. The NNPC management fee wasn't a leak. The frozen EndSARS accounts weren't a glitch. Each of these is a system doing exactly what it was designed to do. The question today isn't what went wrong.

A forensic audit of NNPC is now counting what the Federation Account was owed and never received. A Federal High Court just ruled that banks can't freeze accounts indefinitely without judicial review — five years after they started doing exactly that. The naira slipped again this morning. The CBN meets next week with two numbers pointing in opposite directions.

Ten stories. One question. Let's go.

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Publishing Editor: Adeyemi EKO

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