“This Is No Longer Delay, It Is Rather Deliberate Suppression Of Truth, Implement The Delineation Report”____ Indigenous Warri Stakeholders Charge INEC -

By Uche Alvin

OPEN LETTER TO THE INDEPENDENT NATIONAL ELECTORAL COMMISSION (INEC)
DATE: 4/2/2026

THIS IS NO LONGER DELAY, IT IS DELIBERATE SUPPRESSION OF TRUTH

INEC must stop insulting the intelligence of Nigerians. What is happening in Warri Federal Constituency is not an oversight, not a procedural bottleneck and not an administrative hiccup. It is a conscious decision to bury truth after it has been uncovered. When an electoral body completes its work and then hides the outcome, it ceases to be a neutral umpire and becomes an obstacle to democracy. This silence is no longer passive, it is active wrongdoing.

You know the truth. Your officers walked the creeks and towns. They mapped the settlements. They counted the villages. They recorded the populations. They verified the landmass distribution. The facts were established on the ground, not imagined in offices. There is nothing left to “review.” What remains is fear, fear of correcting a structure that has survived for decades because it benefits powerful interests. INEC’s refusal to publish the final ward delineation result is not neutrality, it is choosing convenience over constitutional duty.

Let it be said plainly and placed on record: any electoral activity conducted without the final ward delineation result is structurally invalid. Voter registration under distorted wards is defective. Party primaries anchored on false structures are illegitimate. Elections conducted without correcting the foundational injustice are void in substance, no matter how neat the paperwork looks. Democracy does not begin at the polling unit, it begins with a truthful structure. Where the structure is false, the outcome is fraud.

History offers no cover for this behavior. Colonial records never supported the fiction of a single-owner Warri. British intelligence and township reports consistently treated Warri as a commercial port and a multi-ethnic space, not a territorial kingdom. Land transactions, leases and rent receipts document negotiated coexistence, not conquest. Courts acknowledged this complexity. Law has never endorsed the simplification of Warri into a monopoly of myth. INEC knows this history. Your fieldwork confirmed it.

By withholding the result, INEC has manufactured an exception zone in Nigerian democracy, an area where the Constitution is paused because truth is inconvenient. This is how institutions rot, not through loud defiance but through strategic silence. Selective obedience to law is not stability, it is slow institutional collapse. If Warri can be excluded today, another constituency will be excluded tomorrow. Silence sets precedent, precedent becomes policy.

This delay is also soft institutional violence. No shots fired, yet rights denied. No bruises, yet dignity stripped. Prolonged administrative silence exhausts communities, normalizes injustice and breeds resentment. Colonial administrations perfected this tactic, discover the truth, then bury it “for peace.” Nigeria must not inherit colonial psychology as democratic governance. Governing by exhaustion is not peacekeeping, it is provocation by neglect.

Do not pretend the law is unclear. It is not. Sovereignty belongs to the people. Discrimination is prohibited. Ward delineation is mandatory and must reflect population and geography. Judicial directives bind all authorities. None of these principles contain an escape clause for political pressure, ethnic lobbying or elite discomfort. Delay in the face of clear duty is willful disobedience, not professionalism.

Let us be brutally honest, delay has become the decision. Silence has become the instrument. And complicity now wears the mask of procedure. This is an institutional embarrassment that must end.

Therefore, and without equivocation, we demand the immediate publication of the final ward delineation result for Warri Federal Constituency, without alteration or manipulation. We demand the suspension and invalidation of all electoral activities premised on the old, distorted ward structure. We demand a public affirmation by INEC that delineation is foundational and that no election can stand on a false base. We demand obedience to the Constitution, not submission to pressure.

History does not forgive institutions that knew the truth and chose silence. Nations do not fall because citizens demand justice, they fall because authorities refuse to deliver it.

Warri is not confused.
The people are not ignorant.
The facts are not missing.

Only the courage to release them is.

Signed:

Chief Tiemopere Joshua ~ President

Chief Ebikeme T. Goodstime ~ Secretary

Concerned Indigenous Stakeholders of Warri Federal Constituency

Cc:
The Presidency

Office of the National Security Adviser

National Assembly

Federal Ministry of Justice

Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN)

National Population Commission