The desperation to win the 2027 general election has led to what looks like a looming constitutional coup against the Nigerian people. We saw what happened in Uganda in January 2026 when the 81-year-old Yoweri Museveni manipulated the electoral process and returned as President for his seventh term after four decades in office. We also witnessed the shenanigans in Cameroon where the 92-year-old Paul Biya returned for his eighth term in office as President after a heavily flawed election of October 12, 2025. Museveni and Biya, among some other African leaders, had engineered a change in their countries’ constitution to abolish term limits in order to entrench themselves in power.
The Presidents of Ivory Coast and Tanzania – Alassane Outtara and Samia Hassan – also manipulated their countries’ electoral processes and barred their main challengers from running in the presidential elections just to win questionable re-elections last year. Nigeria may witness the worst constitutional manipulation if care is not taken.
The 10th Senate under Godswill Akpabio is currently manipulating the democratic sensibilities of many Nigerians. We are familiar with what transpired in that red chamber last week when it passed the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill. It retained Clause 60(3) of the 2022 Electoral Act which provides for digital transmission of election results, but at the discretion of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). It rejected the proposal for mandatory electronic transmission of election results to INEC’s Result Viewing (IReV) portal in real time after signing and stamping Form EC8A.
Specifically, Clause 60, Subsection 3 of the 2022 Electoral Act provides that “the presiding officer shall transfer the results, including the total number of accredited voters and the results of the ballot, in a manner as prescribed by the Commission.” In this 2022 Act, electronic transmission of results is not compulsory. The electoral umpire has the discretion to use either electronic or manual transmission of election results. This does not give room for transparency in the electoral process.
The Senate’s action drew immediate condemnation from Nigerians. Akpabio has been labouring to explain what happened. “This Senate under my watch has not rejected the electronic transmission of results. We have retained what was in the previous provision by way of amendment. The previous provision already made allowance for electronic transmission, so it is still part of our law,” he said. His major concern is that mandating real-time transmission could result in legal disputes if there were network failures during elections. According to him, if the national grid collapses and affects all networks, no election result will be valid.
Akpabio, the national grid will not collapse on the election day. It is this type of reasoning that provided election riggers the latitude to manipulate the 2023 presidential election. INEC said there were technical glitches in the collation of presidential election results. Remember that the electoral umpire had promised before the election that it would electronically transmit election results real time to IReV portal. That never happened. Hence, some candidates purportedly won in certain areas where it was obvious they lost woefully. The Supreme Court relied on the loophole in the Electoral Act to rule in favour of the master riggers. The Court said the IReV portal was only for public viewing and that transmitting results there was not compulsory for INEC.
Nigerians had hoped that the National Assembly would use the opportunity of the current amendment of the Electoral Act to amend this tendentious Section 60(3). But Akpabio’s senate still wants us to go back to Egypt.
Incidentally, the Minority Caucus of the Senate insisted that the Senate approved electronic transmission during consideration of the amendment bill. A former Minority Leader, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, who spoke on behalf of the Caucus, said the Senate did not reject e-transmission of results as contained in the 2022 Act. He said what they passed “is transmission of results. The distinction is important. What is in the 2022 Act is ‘transfer’, but we do not want a law that is vague or capable of misinterpretation.” Abaribe and his group should make themselves clearer. The issue is mandatory e-transmission of election results, not the semantic use of the words, ‘transfer’ and ‘transmit’.
They should consider the unambiguous version that the House of Representatives passed in December 2025 as a guide. It reads: “The Presiding Officer shall electronically transmit the results from each polling unit to the IReV portal in real time and such transmission shall be done after the prescribed Form EC8A have been signed and stamped by the Presiding Officer and/or counter-signed by the candidates or polling unit agents where available at the polling unit.”
Akpabio and his cohorts have been doing a lot of damage to our democracy and getting away with it. They should not be allowed to continue. They know that when it comes to free, fair and credible election, they will fail woefully. They know that many of them parading the corridors of power today do not have the mandate of the Nigerian people in the first place. They imposed themselves on the people and would want the status quo to remain.
Part of the current game plan is to stifle the opposition. Last year, many governors elected on the platform of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) defected to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). They include the Delta State Governor, Sheriff Oborevwori; Akwa Ibom State Governor, Umo Eno; Enugu State Governor, Peter Mbah; Rivers State Governor, Siminalayi Fubara; and Bayelsa State Governor, Douye Diri.
The most surprising of the defections was that of the Governor of Kano State, Abba Yusuf. He became governor on the platform of the New Nigerian People’s Party (NNPP) under the influence of the godfather of Kano politics, Musa Kwankwaso. How they lured him to the APC leaves room for wild conjecture. So far, the ruling party is now in control of 29 out of the 36 states of Nigeria. The PDP controls only four states, while the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Accord and Labour Parties control one state each. Some of these opposition party governors even support Tinubu tacitly.
Perhaps, those brokering the defections of the governors believe that once they defect, the entire masses defect with them. It doesn’t work that way. President Bola Tinubu lost Lagos, of all places, in the 2023 election despite his strong foothold in the state and not minding that the state is a stronghold of the APC. He lost in some other states where the APC is the ruling party. Governors may have influence. They can cajole their appointees and contractors who feed from them to join the party of their choice. But they cannot force the entire mass of the people to vote against their conscience.
The majority of Nigerians are fed up with the goings on in the country. The health sector workers are tired of frequently going on strike over welfare and other issues. Parents, students and teachers are not happy with the rot in the education sector. About 141 million Nigerians or 62 per cent of the population are projected to live in extreme poverty in 2026.
Most residents of Kaduna, Kwara, Katsina, Niger, Benue, Plateau, Borno and many others are reeling from the spate of kidnapping, killings and displacement from their homes by terrorists, bandits and sundry criminals in our midst. Despite assurances, they have not seen any improvement in their lives. They have not seen any tangible effort to protect them.
It is the United States President, Donald Trump, who appears more concerned about the plight of Nigerians. On December 25, 2025, he sent the US Air Force to launch air strikes against some terrorists in Sokoto. Some of the terrorists were killed. Some fled from their base and went elsewhere to continue their atrocities.
Thousands of people have been kidnapped and hundreds of others are still being kidnapped almost on a daily basis. At Woro and Nuku villages in Kaiama Local Government Area of Kwara State, some bunch of terrorists massacred at least 162 people recently. No concrete action to arrest and deal with the perpetrators. More people are regularly being killed in different parts of the country. All that the powers that be are after now is how to rig and come back to power in 2027. But let them know that Nigerians have been pushed to the wall.
Let’s hope that the bipartisan Conference Committee constituted by the two chambers of the National Assembly to reconcile the differences in their respective versions of the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill will satisfy the yearnings of Nigerians. The National Assembly will pass the bill after the final harmonization before it is transmitted to the President for assent.
If real-time transmission of election results is not enshrined in our Electoral Act, it will result in voter apathy not seen before in Nigeria’s history. It has even worsened over the years. In 2007, the voter turnout in the presidential election was 57.5 per cent. In 2011, it came down to 53.7 per cent. In 2015, it further went down to 43.7 per cent and in 2019, it recorded 34.7 per cent. In 2023, it recorded the worst performance ever at 27.1 per cent.
Nigeria should emulate Ghana, Liberia and Senegal which have shown that free and credible election is possible in Africa. We cannot claim to be practising true democracy when the courts have supplanted voters in determining those who govern them. We must resist both military and constitutional coups in the country.