‘Brigandage’ in the Senate

Nigeria’s Senate has long been a theatre of the absurd, but its latest performance deserves a special place in the annals of legislative self humiliation. What unfolded last Tuesday was not a debate, nor even a disagreement. It was a public unravelling; a chamber convulsing in procedural acrobatics, shouting matches, and a level of confusion […]

Nigeria’s Senate has long been a theatre of the absurd, but its latest performance deserves a special place in the annals of legislative self humiliation. What unfolded last Tuesday was not a debate, nor even a disagreement. It was a public unravelling; a chamber convulsing in procedural acrobatics, shouting matches, and a level of confusion that would shame even a student parliament. The proximate cause of the commotion was a single word – transmission – yet the spectacle revealed something far more troubling beyond institutional unseriousness: a legislature so addicted to chaos that it treats national reform as a hostage to its own dysfunction. For weeks, senators – [read “Sinators”] defended their earlier choice of the weaker term – transfer – a linguistic fig leaf designed to dilute the legal force of electronic transmission that would have allowed election results to meander through opaque channels rather than travel directly to the public eye. Only after a nationwide uproar did the chamber rediscover its conscience, or perhaps merely its fear of public backlash. The reversal itself is welcome. The manner of it was a disgrace. 

The tragedy is not that the Senate reversed itself. The tragedy is that it took a national uproar to force it to do the obvious. Senate President Godswill Akpabio presided over the pandemonium like a man attempting to conduct an orchestra in which every musician insists on playing a different song. Points of order were hurled like stones. Senators invoked rules they barely understood, contradicted themselves within minutes, and demanded divisions only to withdraw them. The chamber lurched from confusion to chaos and back again. This is not democracy; this is legislative brigandage – a politics of ambush, improvisation, and procedural vandalism. The Senate did not revisit Clause 60(3) out of principle. It did so because public pressure made the original decision untenable, and forced its hand. Its sudden embrace of transparency is less a moral awakening than a tactical retreat. The chamber’s sudden fidelity to democratic ideals is less a conversion than a capitulation.

Yet the stakes are too high for cynicism alone. Electronic transmission of results is not a semantic indulgence. It is the backbone of electoral credibility and a safeguard against the country’s long history of electoral manipulation; where manual collation has too often been a dark art. If Nigeria is to avoid another crisis of confidence in 2027, the Senate’s belated U turn must be the beginning of seriousness, not another episode of legislative drama. If the chamber wishes to regain public trust, it must learn that democracy is not strengthened by chaos masquerading as debate whose rules change depending on who shouts loudest. A legislature that cannot manage its own proceedings can hardly be trusted to manage the nation’s laws. Because here is the uncomfortable truth: the high-performance election Nigeria deserves will not happen by accident. It requires discipline, planning, and competence, three virtues the Senate rarely displays. 

For electronic transmission to work smoothly in 2027, Nigeria must embark on a sober, methodical march. Following the assent of the bill by President Tinubu, INEC must secure legal clarity, map network coverage, and overhaul its technology strategy. The electoral umpire must build, break, and rebuild its systems through stress tests, mock elections, and cybersecurity drills. In early 2027, INEC must train tens of thousands of ad hoc staff, communicate transparently with the public, and freeze its systems for stability. On election day, BVAS must work, IReV must stay online, and INEC must respond to failures with engineering precision, not bureaucratic panic. This is what competence looks like. This is what a functioning democracy requires. 

Emmanuel Asiwe wrote from Abuja