On Saturday, October 10, 2026, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) published its final list of candidates for the Gombe State governorship election. According to Premium Times, the list had 16 candidates, and none was from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The missing name that mattered most was Isa Ali Pantami’s. He is a professor, a well-known Islamic scholar and a former minister of communications. The PDP had picked him as its candidate, and the list did not say why he was missing.
What is known
Pantami left the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in May 2026 to join the PDP. He later emerged the party’s governorship candidate that month. The party sent his details to INEC on 8 August, and INEC published them on 29 August, according to his lawyers’ letter to INEC dated 12 October. Two rival aspirants then went to the Federal High Court in Gombe to challenge his emergence. On 24 September, the court cancelled the May primary for allegedly not following the legally prescribed procedures. It ordered that a new one be conducted. The PDP held the new primary on 29 September, and Pantami won with 2,054 votes.
On the same day, 24 September, the Supreme Court gave a separate judgment in INEC v. Zenith Labour Party, restoring parts of the Electoral Act 2026, including sections 77(5) to 77(7). These sections say that only people on the membership register a party has given to INEC can vote, or be voted for, in its primaries, and that a party that misses the deadline for submitting its register cannot field candidates. The court also confirmed INEC’s timetable, which required parties to submit their registers between 21 April and 10 May 2026.
INEC’s statement of 14 October, as reported, said Pantami and the PDP’s Ogun State candidate, Ladi Adebutu, were left out because their parties did not meet these register requirements. INEC said it was obeying the Supreme Court under section 287(1) of the Constitution. It said a party that believes its candidate was wrongly left out has 14 days to inform INEC, and that the last day is 24 October.
Two facts are clear. The reason INEC gave is about the party’s register, not about Pantami’s character, scholarship or religion. And he was not the only person affected: reports say an NDC candidate in Kano, Aminu Abdussalam Gwarzo, and candidates of four parties in Bauchi were also dropped.
What each side claims
Pantami’s side is arguing about the law, not religion. His lawyers say INEC has no power to remove a candidate that a party has nominated, that only a court can do that, that INEC’s job at primaries is to attend, watch and report, and that his name was on the register the PDP submitted.
INEC says it is applying the Supreme Court’s ruling on party registers, and that parties have until 24 October to challenge the omissions.
The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), a Lagos-based Islamic advocacy group led by Professor Ishaq Akintola, is the one making the religious claim. At a press conference on 13 October, it called the omission illegal, unfair and a contempt of court, and demanded that Pantami be put back on the list. It accused the INEC chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan, of planning to leave him out, said the decision was driven by religion, and asked President Bola Tinubu to replace him. MURIC gave these reasons: INEC officials watched the 29 September rerun, so INEC cannot now deny it; Amupitan wrote an 80-page legal brief that MURIC says helped lead to the United States naming Nigeria a country of special concern; and Christian clerics are governors in several states, so an Islamic scholar should not be kept out.
A rival PDP aspirant, Usman Aliyu Garry, has also made a claim. He petitioned INEC in a letter it received on 13 October, asking it to check the PDP’s digital membership register for Gombe and to find out whether the party met the legal requirements.
What is still unproven
The public record does not show the exact problem INEC found with the PDP’s Gombe register. Nobody has published the register, INEC’s check of it, or the dates on which the PDP submitted it. Pantami’s lawyers say his name was on it, while a rival aspirant is asking whether the party met the legal requirements. These are claims by people who have something to gain or lose from the outcome.
MURIC’s claim has also not been proved. Its points are not equally strong as evidence. The fact that INEC was present at a primary only shows that the primary took place, not that the party’s register met the rule. The fact that Christian clerics are governors shows that clerics can win elections, but it does not answer a register rule that, in INEC’s account, applied to parties. What MURIC’s statement, as reported, does not have is a document, a message or a similar case to compare, for example an Islamic scholar who was removed while a candidate of another faith in the same position was cleared. MURIC spoke before INEC gave its explanation, and we found no reply from MURIC to it.
The complaint that the rule was not applied the same way to everyone has some basis, but it has also not been proved. ThisDay reported that questions have been raised about the timing of Kingsley Chinda’s party registration, compared with the APC primary, and that the Rivers APC has defended his candidacy. Chinda is the APC candidate in Rivers State. This raises the question of whether the same rule was applied to everyone. We found no answer from INEC.
This does not mean the religious claim is false. It means that, on the public record, the claim rests on conclusions drawn from the circumstances and on the chairman’s past writings, not on evidence of how this decision was made.
Why people read the omission from a religious lens
Three things explain why a dispute about party registers was quickly seen as a religious matter.
The first is who Pantami is. He is a well-known Islamic scholar and former federal minister with a large following. His followers see a decision about him as a decision about him personally, and some see it as a decision about people like them. A candidate’s fame can turn an ordinary official decision into a symbol.
The second is the background of the INEC chairman, and this is the strongest reason. Amupitan was sworn in on 23 October 2025. Soon after, a legal brief he wrote on violence in Nigeria came back into public view. His critics say it supports the claim of a genocide against Christians, a claim the Federal Government has rejected. On 13 November 2025, MURIC said it had lost confidence in him. In late January 2026, the Supreme Council for Shari’ah in Nigeria said Muslims would not accept any election under him. Northern CAN replied that this was an attempt to use religion to weaken a national institution. These are the groups’ own claims. What matters in this case is that by 13 October, the religious way of seeing INEC had already been built up over 11 months, and the Pantami omission was seen through it.
The third is INEC’s silence. The list came with no reasons, and INEC explained itself only four days later, on the day of the deadline set by Pantami’s lawyers and a day after MURIC’s press conference. That gave other people time to fill an unexplained omission with their own explanations. Legit.ng reported on the omissions and linked them to the Supreme Court ruling before INEC said so, while pointing out that INEC’s documents gave no reasons. That link turned out to be right, but it shows how quickly gaps get filled.
It also helps to separate MURIC from Muslims as a whole. MURIC says it stands up for Muslims in all parties, but it speaks for itself and its supporters. Nigeria’s Muslims belong to many sects, parties and regions, and no organisation speaks for all of them. The same is true of Christian bodies such as the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).
Our assessment
The only explanation supported by a published document is the legal one. The Supreme Court judgment exists, INEC’s register rule exists, and INEC applied it to more than one party. The religious explanation is a serious allegation, but so far it rests on the circumstances and on the chairman’s earlier writings. Being a Muslim and being left off a list does not prove that the two are connected.
At the same time, the legal explanation has not been fully proved either. INEC has not said what was wrong with the PDP’s register, and the apparent difference in how the rule was applied to Chinda is a fair question that INEC has not answered. A fair reading is that this is most likely an election and legal dispute that became religious because of who Pantami is, who heads INEC, and the gap left by INEC’s silence. We cannot rule out that religion played a part, because the documents that would show it are not public. But nobody has shown that it did.
One case, or the start of a pattern?
It is too early to call this a national religious controversy, and the evidence does not support calling it a completely one-off case either. What is documented is a longer pattern in the way one advocacy group and one council describe one institution. It runs from November 2025, through MURIC’s August allegation that Muslim women in hijab were turned away at the Osun governorship vote, to this month. The Gombe omission fits into that pattern. It does not show that INEC shuts people out on religious grounds, because the one decision in question has a legal explanation that applied to others besides Pantami, and nobody has yet checked that explanation against the documents.
The next steps are clear. Parties have until 24 October to tell INEC. Garry’s petition asks INEC to check the PDP’s Gombe register. Pantami’s lawyers set a deadline of 14 October, which passed without a published reply, and they warned that further legal action could follow. In the reports we could find, there was no INEC reply to MURIC’s allegation, no published check of the PDP’s Gombe register, and no court case filed by Pantami.
What can be said at this point is limited but also clear. It is confirmed that Pantami was left off the list, that INEC gave a reason based on a party-register rule from a Supreme Court judgment, and that the rule was not used against him alone. It is also confirmed that the religious reading came from MURIC and from an earlier dispute about the INEC chairman, not from any document about this decision. What is not confirmed is that Pantami’s religion played any part, and also that it played none.