The upper chamber of the National Assembly, the Senate, on Wednesday eventually passed the Electoral Act Amendment Bill, 2025 into law after a tempestuous five-hour debate and a spell of dissension.
The passage, however, came with an upset. A provision about the electronic transmission of election results that has stirred the hornets’ nest since the 2023 elections, like an albatross, refused to abate. It dogged the steps of the Red Chamber after passing the new bill.
The sour point that has stirred public outrage is the Senate’s rejection of the proposal in the new Clause 60(5) of the draft bill, which aimed at mandating presiding officers to electronically transmit polling unit results to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC’s) Result Viewing (IReV) portal real time after completing and signing Form EC8A.
It instead decided to retain the existing provision of the Electoral Act, 2022, which gives the INEC the latitude to determine the mode of transmission, without making electronic transmission compulsory.
The House of Representatives, however, toed a different line, as it passed the bill on December 23, last year, approving the real-time electronic transmission of poll results as provided in the draft bill.
This is one of the areas of dissent that both chambers have to quickly resolve before the bill can become law. Already, both chambers have set up conference committees to harmonise the different versions of the bill passed by them.
Senate President Godswill Akpabio, who announced the Senate version of the committees shortly after passing the bill, said the committee has been mandated to conclude its assignment this month to enable the National Assembly transmit a harmonised bill to the President for assent.
But the Red Chamber has been put on the spot, courting the anger of members of the public and electoral stakeholders for rejecting real-time upload of election results in the newly passed bill.
The kernel of the angry outbursts is that the upper chamber has, by its action, simply shut the door against one of the most potent weapons against rigging and for protecting the sanctity of the electoral system.
Truly, in the trajectory of past elections in Nigeria, a lot happens between the polling units and the collation centres. In many cases, compromised electoral officials, party agents and non- state actors often collude to tamper with the results in the process. In some cases, ballot boxes are hijacked and snatched or even swapped between the polling units and collation centres.
That largely explains why results eventually announced at the collation centres often differ from those recorded at polling units. Hence, transmitting results to INEC’s IReV portal real-time or on the spot is one of the surest ways of safeguarding the sanctity of poll results.
The 2023 elections, most especially the presidential poll, witnessed plenty of nasty slugfest among the major contending political parties— the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP), as well as their intemperate, almost unruly crowds of supporters.
One of the issues that roused intense wrangle during the 2023 elections was the failure of the Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu- INEC to upload most of the poll results into its IReV portal from the polling units, citing technical glitches, even when the Electoral Act, 2022, as amended, provided for it.
Since then, calls have remained strident for the authorities to institute electoral reforms that would mitigate rigging and restore the increasingly waning public confidence in elections in the country.
The transmission of election results from the polling units immediately after each voting process has been one of the core demands being canvassed to restore the integrity and credibility of the electoral process.
It thus flies in the face of logic that the Senate can botch up a momentum like this to make history by throwing away that provision to have election results transmitted live and loaded on the INEC’s IReV portal to enthrone transparency in our electoral system.
It appears that many of our senators profit more from the old system that makes it a doddle to manipulate poll results. Many of them, and perhaps members of the executive arm, appear to be mortally afraid of winning elections in a free and fair contest, which the immediate upload of results from the polling units guarantees.
Of course, the Senate President and ranking senators, led by Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, have vociferously defended the position of the upper chamber, arguing that rejecting real-time transmission of results does not amount to completely doing away with electronic transmission.
Abaribe, who spoke for the ranking senators, told reporters in Abuja that the Senate neither voted against electronic transmission nor called for the return to manual processes, stressing that the reports along those lines were incorrect and misleading.
“Yesterday (Wednesday), the Senate did not — I repeat — did not pass transfer of results which was in the 2022 Act. What we passed, and which the Senate President himself clarified while sitting on his chair, is transmission of results. And I need to make this very clear,” he said.
Abaribe lamented that the distinction between “transfer” and “transmission” had been wrongly interpreted, fueling the impression that the Senate had taken Nigeria backwards on electoral reforms.
He explained that the provision for electronic transmission of results was not an afterthought but the product of an extensive legislative process involving both chambers of the National Assembly and key stakeholders.
Dismissing claims that any clause supporting electronic transmission was removed at any stage of the Senate process, Abaribe said: “There was no going backwards,” he said. “As the Senate President reiterated yesterday, we are not going backwards; rather, we are going home.”
The argument appears forceful, but it has not vitiated the fact that although the Red Chamber did not vote against electronic transmission of poll results, but it failed to approve the mandatory real-time upload of poll results by INEC, which was what the amendment in Clause 60(5) sought.
In other words, since the transmission is not made mandatory, the electoral umpire is still at liberty to determine whether or not to transmit results live or immediately from the poll units, just as it is provided in the Electoral Act, 2022.
So, as it is now, there is no iron-cast safeguard that the results announced and recorded at the poll units will most certainly be the same that will eventually be announced at the collation centres. That is the crux of the matter.
A legal practitioner, who is a consultant to a senator, however, provided a personal opinion into why he believes members of the upper chamber appear to be reluctant in making real-time upload of results mandatory.
According to him, doing so could create logistical bottlenecks for INEC. He believes that Nigeria is not ripe yet for a mandatory electoral transmission of results from the polling units because of the unstable power situation in the country, most especially in the rural areas.
Hence, to achieve that, according to him, the commission may have to provide alternative power supply (maybe generating sets or solar power system)in every polling unit, which, he believes, will be challenging or difficult to achieve going by the sheer large number of polling units in a verse country like Nigeria.
“So, in my view, we may not be ready for a mandatory real-time transmission of results as it is the case in many advanced democracies of the world until we have achieved a consistently stable 24-hour power supply all over the country, including the rural areas.
“Even then, I believe the INEC can still conduct credible elections with what we have on ground and comply substantially with the Electoral Act in future elections, as the law provides,” he submitted.
Erratic power supply is truly an issue, but we believe a way can be found around it. First, going forward, we admonish the National Assembly conference committees to pander to popular demand by adopting the position of the lower chamber and approve the mandatory real-time upload of results as provided in the harmonized bill.
Second, some exceptions can then be granted in the new law to insulate INEC and guide the commission in the event of technical glitches such as power failure and/or network problems that may vitiate immediate transmission of results to its IReV portal in particularly difficult or peculiar terrains during voting.
The ball is in the court of the electoral umpire to tacitly manoeuvre through the labyrinth. We urge the new INEC chairman, Prof. Joash Ojo Amupitan (SAN), and his team to show a high sense of responsibility not to abuse such exceptions in managing eventualities in peculiar terrains during elections.
He should borrow a leaf from one of his predecessors, Prof. Attahiru Jega, who made a difference in a rotten system by conducting credible and globally applauded polls in 2011 and 2015, even at a challenging transition period, which saw an incumbent roundly defeated.
Not minding calls from some quarters for Prof. Amupitan’s removal due to some publications not related to elections, which he authored some years back, he has been profiled in independent reviews as a credible, untainted academic who promises to make a difference on the electoral landscape this time.
He should be conscious that he is on the cusp of history and give the nation credible and widely acceptable elections in 2027 as a test case of his touted integrity.
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