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.
1.
THE 15 PERCENT ELECTION
On Saturday, 239,210 people voted in the FCT area council elections out of 1,680,315 registered. APC won five of six councils. In AMAC — Abuja's largest council, with 837,338 registered voters — Wike's candidate won 40,295 votes. The PDP candidate got 3,398. The PDP's own candidate had stepped down before election day following Wike's intervention.
This was the first election run under the Electoral Act Tinubu signed five days earlier. The transmission framework ran without drama. The result sheets were signed. Everything was legal.
In 2027, presidential results from these same councils move through the same structure. What happened in AMAC on Saturday wasn't a violation of the system. It was the system.
2.
NNPC KEPT YOUR MONEY
A forensic audit of NNPC is now underway. The Ministry of Finance confirmed it last Friday. It's examining the 30% management fee NNPC has been collecting on profit oil and profit gas since the Petroleum Industry Act of 2021 — money that left before the Federation Account received anything. States got what was left.
Tinubu's executive order of February 13 suspended the fee. It also redirected Frontier Exploration funds and gas flare penalties directly into the Federation Account. The order has been gazetted. NNPC reported ₦60.5 trillion in revenue in 2025.
The audit is now trying to reconstruct what the Federation Account should have received during the years those figures were accumulating. No one has said yet how large that number is.
3.
FROZEN WITHOUT CHARGES
A Federal High Court in Abuja ruled this morning that commercial banks must lift blanket post-EndSARS restrictions placed on customer accounts without fresh court orders. Some of those accounts have been frozen since 2020. The customers were never charged with any offence.
The judge ruled that banks cannot rely on indefinite security flags without periodic judicial review. That should have been the rule in 2020.
The ruling doesn't compensate the people who spent five years locked out of their own money. It doesn't explain who reviewed each flag in 2023, 2024, 2025 and decided it was still valid. It just confirms that what the banks were doing was wrong. A Federal High Court needed to say that in 2026.
4.
THE NAIRA THIS MORNING
The naira weakened again in early Monday trading, widening the gap between official and parallel market rates after a brief period of stability. Importers say dollar liquidity tightened late last week. Airlines are still repatriating fare backlogs in instalments rather than full settlements.
This is the same pattern. The CBN supplies dollars, the rate firms up, the supply eases, the gap widens. That's not exchange rate stability. That's a managed queue.
The CBN meets next week with food inflation falling and the naira sliding. Those two numbers point in different directions. Whichever way the MPC moves will tell you which problem they actually believe is bigger.
5
THE SUBSIDY THAT DIDN'T LEAVE
Independent fuel marketers are warning that subsidy arrears and FX volatility are squeezing margins again — despite the official removal of petrol subsidies in 2023. Some depots have quietly adjusted pump prices in anticipation of higher landing costs tied to exchange rate movement.
The mechanism changed. The pressure didn't. Before removal, the government held the FX exposure through the subsidy bill. After removal, marketers hold it until they move it to the pump.
If the subsidy is gone but the pressure is still there, where exactly did it go?
6.
WIKE'S RESULT
Before Saturday's AMAC election, the PDP's own chairmanship candidate stepped down publicly in Wike's candidate's favour. He said it followed Wike's intervention. The national PDP called it anti-democratic. Maikalangu won 40,295 votes anyway.
Nothing about this was illegal. The votes were counted. The sheets were signed by multiple party agents. Tinubu's spokesperson congratulated Wike personally for the political dividends his FCT tenure had produced.
The 2027 presidential election will be counted in these same councils, in polling units that now have APC chairs, in a territory administered by the minister who just delivered five of six to the ruling party.
7.
THE CBN'S IMPOSSIBLE MEETING
The Central Bank's Monetary Policy Committee meets next week. Food inflation is at 8.89% — the first single-digit reading since 2015. On paper, the case for a rate cut has rarely looked stronger.
But the naira is sliding. Energy and transport costs haven't followed food prices down. And the 8.89% figure comes with a footnote: the NBS expanded its CPI basket from 740 to 934 items during the same period, which changes how the number is calculated.
Cutting rates signals confidence in the inflation data. Holding signals the naira is the real problem. The MPC can't fully address both. What the governor says in the press conference after will tell you which number they actually believe.
8.
THE POWER PROJECT THAT KEEPS RESTARTING
The federal government reopened talks this weekend with a European consortium over a power infrastructure project first announced in 2021. The original completion timeline passed. Not a single turbine from this project is currently operational.
This is not the first restart. Each previous round produced a new timeline and a signing ceremony. The gap between Nigeria's electricity generation — around 4,000 megawatts — and estimated demand — over 20,000 megawatts — has barely moved.
The people paying for that gap aren't in the room when talks resume. They're running generators, repricing goods, or simply closing when the power goes out for the fourth time this week.
9.
THIRD LARGEST
Nigeria owes the World Bank's IDA $18.7 billion as of December 2025. That's third in the world, behind Bangladesh at $23 billion and Pakistan at $19.4 billion. The figure rose by $1.9 billion in twelve months. A new $500 million IDA credit for agriculture is expected to be approved by March 30.
IDA lends to low-income and vulnerable countries that can't access commercial debt sustainably. Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are the three countries drawing most from that window.
A forensic audit is counting what NNPC owed the Federation Account and didn't pay. The new loan application is already being processed. Both things are true at the same time.
10.
THE 1993 STORY
Last night at London's Royal Festival Hall, Wunmi Mosaku won Best Supporting Actress at the BAFTA Film Awards for her role in Sinners. She's the first Black British woman to win that prize. Born in Nigeria, raised in Manchester, she said afterwards that the role let her reconnect with parts of her identity she'd felt pressure to suppress.
An hour earlier, My Father's Shadow won Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. It's a film about a father and his two sons walking through Lagos on the day the 1993 presidential election was annulled. The boys don't fully understand what's happening. The father does.
Nigeria held an election on Saturday under a new Electoral Act whose central argument — whether human discretion in the collation chain can be trusted — is the same argument that's been running since 1993. The Davies brothers made a film about that day. It won a British award in 2026. The thing it was made about is still unresolved.
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