There was confusion on Tuesday, September 1 when the Akwa Ibom State Government referred to Senate President Godswill Akpabio as the “Acting President of Nigeria” in a social media post during the official reception of a new Airbus A220-300 aircraft acquired by state’s carrier, Ibom Air.
According to a Premium Times report, the description, which appeared on the state government’s official Facebook livestream of the event at the Victor Attah International Airport, Uyo, was later edited to reflect his status as Senate President.
The post initially read: “Arrival of the Acting President of Nigeria, Sen. Dr. Godswill Akpabio, GCON, President of the Senate, Chairman of the National Assembly, at the Official Reception and Water Cannon Ceremony for the brand-new Airbus A220-300, as part of the activities commemorating the 39th Anniversary Celebration of Akwa Ibom State.”
How the title came about was not clear but NewsClick Nigeria can confirm that President Bola Tinubu is currently outside Nigeria on a three-week vacation in Europe. At the same time, Vice President Kashim Shettima had also travelled abroad to represent the president at an African Union summit in Angola.
The Presidency announced on 30 August that Tinubu had departed Abuja for Europe for his annual leave, with London as his first destination. It said he was expected to return after the vacation to participate in activities ahead of the 2027 elections.
The Vice President on the other hand left Abuja on 29 August for Luanda, Angola, to represent the president at the 21st Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union. He returned to Abuja on Monday, 31 August, after concluding his engagements in Angola.
However, some Akwa Ibom people on Facebook, have been “celebrating the elevation” Akpabio as Nigeria’s “acting president”.
“Thank God our Senator Godswill Akpabio is the acting president…let’s build Ibom Deep Seaport,” one Facebook user, Ima Utip, wrote on the social media site on Monday.
According to Section 145 of the Nigerian 1999 Constitution, as amended, whenever the president proceeds on vacation or is otherwise unable to discharge the functions of his office, he is to transmit a written declaration to the Senate president and Speaker of the House of Representatives.
The presidency has not publicly announced that President Tinubu transmitted such a declaration to the National Assembly before leaving the country for his vacation.
The Vice President’s brief absence, however, creates a separate constitutional question because Section 145 specifically identifies the vice president, rather than the Senate president, as the person who performs the president’s functions during the president’s temporary absence.
The Constitution does not ordinarily designate the Senate president as acting president merely because both the president and vice president are outside the country.
Section 146 of the Constitution provides that the Senate president may assume office as president only when the office of the president becomes vacant, and the office of the vice president is also vacant. That provision concerns a vacancy in office, rather than a temporary absence from the country.
On this backdrop, the Akwa Ibom government’s description of the Senate President as acting president appears to go beyond the constitutional arrangement for temporary presidential absence.
When Premium Times contacted the state’s Commissioner for Information, Aniekan Umanah, on Tuesday night, he initially denied the controversial Facebook post, stressing that such had never happened.
But when our paper informed him that there was a screenshot of the post before it was edited, Umanah claimed what happened must have been an error by the social media handler.
“I don’t know. Maybe somebody made a mistake. There’s nothing like that (acting president) in the country,” he said.
When pressed further, the commissioner said: “Nobody authorised that (reference) here. Maybe the people typing may have made a mistake, but that cannot be the position of the state government.”