The Labour Party and the Nigeria Labour Congress on Wednesday signalled a major grassroots realignment ahead of the 2027 general elections, unveiling plans to mobilise workers across the country as polling unit agents to safeguard the party’s votes.
The decision was made at a one-day Strategic Multi-Level Stakeholders Summit of the Labour Party, held in Abuja, where party leaders and organised labour representatives resolved to deepen membership registration and validation, using union structures as the backbone of the party’s grassroots operations.
The renewed strategy is rooted in the party’s experience in the 2023 presidential election and the legal battle that followed.
Former LP presidential candidate Peter Obi had filed a petition challenging the outcome of the disputed presidential poll, which the ruling party won.
Obi, who campaigned as a political outsider and galvanised many young and first-time voters, came third in the election, behind eventual winner Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress and the main opposition candidate, Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party.
Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party finished fourth, ahead of 14 other candidates.
At the heart of the Labour Party’s post-election grievance were disputes over the electronic transmission of results and the collection of Form EC8A — the official polling unit result sheet required to substantiate claims in court.
Party leaders have repeatedly argued that inadequate grassroots coordination and the failure to deploy a structured network to retrieve result sheets from polling units weakened their case at the tribunal.
Addressing stakeholders at Wednesday’s summit, Acting National Chairman of the Labour Party, Senator Nenadi Usman, said the party had learnt hard lessons and must now build a formidable structure anchored on labour institutions.
She said, “When the LP National Working Committee approached the NLC and the TUC leaderships, we told them that the basics of a political party are being able to successfully register your members right from the grassroots.
“But without knowing who your members are or where they hail from, you can never plan well. And we have seen that in the 2023 election, not using these two institutions to anchor the party firmly at the grassroots led to the problems we had.
“Our problem is to ensure that we register our members right from the grassroots using the major institutions that are the foundation of the Labour Party, the NLC, the TUC and all the unions. If we can use them to register our members right from the polling unit, then we know we are on the way to success.”
The former minister stressed the need for the party to build a reliable membership database and deploy registered members as polling unit agents during elections to prevent disputes over the electronic transmission of results.
Central to this plan, she said, is the systematic collection of Form EC8A at every polling unit, describing the document as indispensable to defending the party’s votes.
We need to have our people registered in our data and should use them as polling unit agents when elections come to avoid talks about a glitch or no glitch during electronic transmission. We all saw what happened.
So, I think the basic foundation is what we are doing today, getting to ensure our members are registered so that henceforth we should start taking record of that important document, Form EC8A, at every polling unit. We cannot do without that form.
