Electoral Bill, Senators and the drama over e-transmission

The rejection of mandatory electronic transmission of results by the Senate last week threw the nation into political turmoil, pitching political parties, civil society and other stakeholders against the red chamber. JOHN AMEH, in this report, captures the drama and the topsy-turvy trend of the Electoral Amendment Bill 2026 and the volte-face of the senators on Tuesday.

ANYONE with a discerning mind, watching the circus that took place on the floor of the Senate on Wednesday last week, would most definitely conclude that Nigeria is a country not ready to deepen its democracy. Nigeria, because the 109 senators are a microcosm of the country, representing an estimated 238 million people. Yes, that’s how to put it on face value. But did they really speak or meet the expectations of the majority? No! In Wednesday’s case, a few spoke for themselves, at a great loss to the majority of the citizenry.

What was at stake was the Electoral Bill, 2026, painstakingly crafted to address some mischiefs and loopholes in the country’s electoral system. Democracy is democracy because it’s the People’s wish. This wish can only be actualised if their votes count in elections. There will always be the hunger to rush to a polling unit on election day because the voter believes the power to decide who governs them lies with them.

Over the past 27 years, this power has been hijacked from the people by a few, who have the capacity to deploy resources -money, agents of state, violence, and manipulation -to thwart the wishes of the people in deciding their leaders.

The background to the new Electoral Bill, 2026

Nigeria’s electoral system, like a car at the panel beater’s shop, has beenchanginge 1999, hoping to get the right shape with the Electoral Act, 2022 granting the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) the discretion to determine the mode of delivering election results -could be by physical transportation after collation or through electronic transmission -whichever way, the discretion lay with INEC.

Using this power of discretion, the Commission, during the 2023 polls, opted for the electronic transmission of results. In the National Assembly polls, which preceded the Presidential Election, INEC successfully uploaded results to its IREV Portal without hitches. However, when it reached the turn of the presidential poll, the umpire suddenly developed cold feet, opting for manual collation midway, using the flimsy excuse of “technology glitches”, to collate and declare the winner.

Expectedly, there was nationwide outrage and allegations of fraud, manipulation of results was strident. Leading candidates, who contested against President Bola Tinubu, the eventual winner, including former Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), cried foul! The polity was heated to breaking points as the opposition candidates swore that Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) did not win the election.

The options left to the protesters narrowed down to the courts. After all the legal fireworks at the Supreme Court, the apex court, in a landmark judgment it delivered in October 2023, declared that electronic transmission of results was not known to any Nigerian law, let alone the Electoral Act, 2022. The court held that declaring election results via electronic transmission was not mandatory because the electoral law did not say so explicitly.

The takeaways of the judgment include: Discretion of INEC: The apex court affirmed that INEC retains the legal authority and discretion to determine the specific mode for transmitting and collating election results.

IReV and Collation: The court clarified that the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal is not a collation system and is intended only for public viewing. Impliedly, failure or unavailability of results on IReV does not invalidate an election outcome or halt the manual collation process.

Statutory Requirements: The ruling emphasized that the Electoral Act 2022 does not explicitly mandate “electronic transmission” only; rather, it allows INEC to prescribe any manner it deems fit, which may include manual or electronic mmethods

This position of the court had been reflected in the earlier paragraphs of this piece.

The consequence of the judgment was that Atiku lost, Obi lost, and all the noise about election manipulation ended amid the dashed hopes of millions of voters.

The desire to cure a mischief

Nigerian voters, having learnt a lesson in a very hard way, began painstaking engagements across board -INEC, civil society, election observers, legislators, agents of state, political parties, and many more -to amend the electoral law such that ‘mandatory’ transmission of election results would be unambiguously captured in the new Electoral Bill. That was the consensus reached at all the stakeholder engagements and was properly captured in the bill.

In the Electoral Bill 2026, electronic transmission of results was clearly captured in Clause 60 (3).

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 has been signed and stamped by the Presiding Officer and/or countersigned by the candidates or polling agents available at the polling unit.”

READ ALSO: The tension in Rivers

At all the consultations and discussions held leading to Wednesday last week, including among most of the senators themselves, the consensus reportedly was that this provision should be passed to strengthen the process and engender voter confidence; that their votes would count in 2027. If there was any key reason the new bill generated so much interest and attention, it was this Clause 60 (3); nothing else in the bill seemed to matter in the buildup to last Wednesday.

The House of Representatives, in its wisdom, passed the clause, having been a product of the Joint Committee of the Senate and the Green Chamber. Nigerians excitedly waited for the Senate, being the ‘senior brother’ in the two legislative arms, to concur.

How senators disappointed constituents on the biggest stage

The day finally came on Wednesday last week, but the lawmakers failed to deliver. They rather disappointed their eagerly-waiting constituents by amending the clause to bring it in tandem with the provision in the 2022 Electoral Act. The mandatory provision was amended by replacing electronic transmission and real-time with the word “transfer” before passing the clause.

The swift amendment was made after the Chief Whip, Senator Mohammed Monguno, moved a motion for it and was seconded by the Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Barau Jibrin, before the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, put it to a vote and rammed his gavel in favour of the amendment. Monguno, in his words, said, “to bring it in line with what is in the Electoral Act, 2022.”

Akpabio, while later rounding off the session after the bill passed third reading, also affirmed that what the Senate did was to revert to the 2022 Electoral Act, a provision that doesn’t make electronic transmission of results mandatory. IImplicitly INEC still reserves the power to determine the mode of transmission of election results, which can be manual or electronic, but e-transmission is not mandatory.

Section 60(5) of the extant 2022 Act states: “The presiding officer shall transfer the result, including the total number of accredited voters and the result of the ballot, in a manner as prescribed by the Commission.”

This provision was what the new bill was amended to reflect, a case of changing nothing!

Most disheartening was that many senators, who were supposedly on a national duty paid for by taxpayers, did not even seem to know that the bill was amended to remove mandatory electronic transmission of results. They believed what was passed was the mandatory provision, meaning that they were taken unawares by Monguno, Bara,u and Akpabio, or so it seemed. This failure explained why many of them agreed with the leadership’s defence/explanation that mandatory e-transmission of results was passed. It wasn’t.

Signs that things might go wrong showed early when the Senate postponed the passage of the bill three times. It had first been listed to pass the bill on Wednesday, January 31. However, the Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, rising to offer an explanation, said lawmakers would first take the document home to study the details. The Senate then set Thursday, the following day, as the date to pass the bill. But, on the said Thursday, senators opted for a closed-door deliberation that lasted over two hours.

When they returned to open plenary, Akpabio announced that a mini-committee was set up during the camera session to distill senators’ views on the bill and report back on Tuesday, February 3, for the bill to be passed. The small committee was chaired by Senator Niyi Adegonmire, who now temporarily took over the work of the Senate Committee on Electoral Matters. The latter committee, a standing committee, has the former governor of Plateau State, Simon Lalong, as the chairman.

As senators reconvened on the appointed new date, another executive session was again called by Akpabio, lasting about four hours. On resuming plenary after the session, Akpabio merely announced that the lawmakers discussed matters “relevant to the working of the Senate and the nation at large.”

He promptly adjourned the Senate till Thursday, February 4, and made no mention of the awaited electoral law.

February 4 eventually came, only for senators to drop mandatory e-transmission of election results from the bill.

The agony of betrayal

That Nigerians felt betrayed by the action of the Senate is being mild. The cut is deep,p and the pa isn excruciating. From top opposition leaders to civil society groups, the media, voters, political parties, and other major stakeholders -all have been expressing their disappointment since the unbelievable happened at the Senate.

The Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC), collaborating with INEC and several civil society groups/the Civil Society Situation Room, was deeply involved in the stakeholder engagements and public hearing on the bill.

The Executive Director, Dr Clement Nwankwo, simply said he had become “depressed” by the step the Senate took. Nwankwo said what played out was possibly the script of a few senators pursuing certain interests, but definitely not the wish of the majority of the lawmakers.

“The bill was a product of wide consultations across layers. There was a joint committee sitting of the Senate and the House of Representatives, which came up with a joint report. The House passed it, and we were waiting for the Senate”, he said.

“I think what is at play is the interest of a few people. I do not believe, and I do not think that the President (Bola Tinubu) has a desire to ensure that there is no electronic transmission of results in real time. I have never seen a situation where a legislature will go ahead and pass an amendment that the majority of senators disagreed with.”

Peter Obi, one of the candidates who challenged the results of the 2023 polls, has been no less aghast. He says it’s purely a plot to manipulate the 2027 polls.

Obi stated, “The Senate’s blatant rejection of mandatory electronic transmission of election results is an unforgivable act of electoral manipulation ahead of 2027.

“This failure to pass a clear safeguard is nothing short of a deliberate assault on Nigeria’s democracy. By rejecting these essential transparency measures, they are eroding the very foundation of credible elections.

“One must ask: Does the government exist to ensure order and justice, or to institutionalise chaos? Is its purpose to serve the people, or to fulfil the sinister ambitions of a select few?

The former governor of Anambra State warned, “By rejecting mandatory electronic transmission, a critical safeguard for electoral integrity, we are entrenching disorder aimed at perpetuating confusion according to the whims of a small clique. Have we not reached a point where we must think seriously about the future of our country and our children? Should leadership not focus on building a credible, orderly, and livable nation for the next generation, rather than one permanently ensnared in chaos?

“Let there be no illusion, the criminality witnessed in 2023 will not be tolerated in 2027. Nigerians everywhere must start getting ready to rise, resist, and reject the backward trajectory, legitimately and decisively reclaim our country from the clutches of deliberate malevolence.”

Apart from condemning the Senate individually, major opposition parties, including the PDP, ADC, and NNPP, have also jointly kicked against the removal of mandatory e-transmission of results.

“With this anti-people and anti-democratic action, we are concerned that the APC-led Senate may have set Nigeria’s democracy back by many decades. It is therefore not surprising that it has deservedly attracted widespread opposition and condemnation from Nigerians across all divides”, the parties said.

Elder statesman and former Deputy National Chairman of the PDP (South-South), Chief Olabode George, slammed the Senate for its “disgusting, disgraceful, and distasteful” conduct by voting against mandatory e-transmission of results.

He spoke more, “Now, this is the greatest shock, it is; this year is a very, very critical year for political activities.

“To hear that there is an electronic transition, you can have options: you can do it, or you cannot do it. It is sending Nigeria completely back into the Stone Age. We want justice, we want fairness, and we want equity. I am absolutely disgusted and disappointed about this.

“Our lawmakers, are they lawmakers or lawbreakers? So, how can you be talking when everybody is heading in a direction of civility, direction of decency, direction of calmness, to make sure that the people who will manage the affairs of this country are genuinely elected by the people?”

Senator Victor Umeh, who was in the chamber the day the contentious clause was passed,d is also shell-shocked, completely disowning his colleagues.

“The way to fix the problem is to agree with what the Nigerian people agreed. Law is not made by the National Assembly alone. No law can be passed in Nigeria without subjecting it to public hearing”, Umeh said.

Senate’s belated redemption?

Last weekend, the entireof  Nigeria was standing against the Senate, and only two windows were left open for redemption. One of the windows was the failure of the Senate to approve the Votes and Proceedings of February 4, which would have sealed the fate of the bill, and something that was described as a kind of “divine intervention.” The second option was for the Senate to terminate its two-week suspension of plenary to consider the 2026 budget, host a special sitting, and bring itself into the reckoning of the people. As things were getting hot in the polity, the Senate announced it was holding a special session fixed for February 10. Though the agenda of the special session was not disclosed, it was clear that the kitchen was becoming too hot for the cook and that the Seate needed to calm the nerves.

Senate finally recants

At its emergency sitting on Tuesday, the Senate reversed its contentious ruling of last week, and passed the amendment to Section 60 (3) of the electoral amendment bill. The lawmaker’s decision to retain the provision of the Electoral Act 2022 had been the source of tension, which enveloped the nation for a whole week.  During the session to consider the votes and proceedings of February 4, the Senate adopted the proposed legislation for electronic transfer in the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2025, even though they added a proviso.

The proposed Section 60 (3) already passed by the House of Representatives states that “The Commission shall electronically transmit the results from each polling unit to IREV portal in real time and such transmission shall be done after the prescribed Form EC8A has been signed and stamped by the Presiding Officer and/or countersigned by the candidates or polling agents available at the polling unit.” However, the Senators added a proviso indicating that iifelection transmission fails, “the Form EC8A will be the primary means of collation.”

Senate President Godswill Akpabio said: “The clause being debated provided that presiding officers shall electronically transmit the results from the polling units to the INEC’s IReV portal and provided that if the electronic transmission fails and it becomes difficult to transmit the results, the Form EC8A will be the primary means of collation.”

To set the tone for redemption, the Senator representing Borno North and Chief Whip of the Senate, Tahir Monguno, moved the motion he earlier moved, which caused all the uproar of the past week.

The Senator said: “This amendment is to bring our laws to make it a replica of the wishes and aspirations of the people. Electronic transmission ensures speed, accuracy, and accountability in reporting election results.” The motion was seconded by Senator representing Bauchi Central, Abdul Ningi, and when the Senate President put the motion to a voice vote, it was affirmed by the Senators. The Senate provided the redemption under Orders 1(b) and 52(6) of the Standing Orders to reconsider earlier decisions. The stage is now set for the conference committee to complete the process of passing the bill.

After ratifying an increase in the number of Senate conference committee members to 12, to reflect the same number approved by the House of Representatives, Akpabio said, “This is a matter of urgency. If the committee concludes its work quickly, the President should be able to sign the amended Electoral Bill into law this month.”

The last line

As expected, the Senate recognised the ticking time bomb its decision of last week had engineered and was able to reverse itself in good time. It was also an opportunity for Nigerians to reawaken their consciousness about the nation’s democracy, as the emerging gulf between the leaders and the led appears to be widening. As the conference committee looms, the time for public decadence on matters of national concern should be a thing of the past. Above all, the message should remain constant, that as the 2027 election approaches, the law and the actors must assure the citizens that mandatory electronic transmission of results must hold, the votes must count, and the room for manipulation must be terminated. In 2027, the people’s vote must count; anything less betrays the nation’s soul.