By Hon. Kenneth Gbandi
When the Senate President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Senator Godswill Akpabio, openly declared on national television that nine states of the federation have no network coverage due to insecurity, he did more than make a statement. He issued a self-indictment, one that exposes the depth of failure, complacency, and moral bankruptcy at the highest level of our national leadership.
In any serious democracy, such an admission would trigger national outrage, immediate policy action, and possibly resignation. In Nigeria, it was delivered casually, almost proudly, as though incompetence has become a badge of office.
Let us be clear: Nigeria has 36 states. If nine states are effectively unreachable, then one-quarter of the country has been functionally abandoned. This is not a technical glitch. It is not a temporary inconvenience. It is a collapse of governance.
Yet instead of sounding the alarm and mobilizing the Senate toward urgent solutions, the Number Three citizen of Nigeria chose a different path pre-emptively justifying why elections may not hold, why technology may fail, and why Nigerians should lower their expectations yet again.
Where is the shame?
Where is the urgency?
Where is leadership?
The 2027 general elections are not years away; they are months away. In a country that claims to be democratic, this should be a period of intense preparation, security reinforcement, infrastructure hardening, and technological redundancy planning. Instead, the Senate President is publicly laying the groundwork for electoral sabotage, deepening public distrust, and fueling voter apathy.
As if the admission of insecurity-induced network blackout was not damaging enough, Senator Akpabio went further to predict a possible national grid collapse, one that could affect communications and, by extension, election results. Let that sink in.
Rather than assuring Nigerians that the Senate is working to prevent these failures, the Senate President is forecasting them, as though collapse is inevitable and responsibility is optional. This is not leadership. This is irresponsible dereliction of duty.
One is compelled to ask: what happened to governance? What happened to planning, forecasting, and mitigation?
Senator Akpabio appears to have perfected the art of diagnosing Nigeria’s problems without any intention of solving them. Nigerians did not elect senators to become political analysts. They elected them to legislate, to lead, and to act.
Why has the Senate not declared a state of emergency on insecurity ahead of the 2027 elections? Why has there been no legislative emergency on the dilapidated national grid? Why is there no national emergency on poor network coverage, especially when elections increasingly rely on technology?
These are not abstract questions. They are practical, urgent, and solvable if there is political will.
If insecurity threatens network infrastructure, where is the multi-layered security Plan B? If the national grid is unreliable, why is there no mandated solar and hybrid power backup for all electoral infrastructure? If terrestrial networks are weak in remote or volatile areas, why has the Senate not pushed for satellite-based solutions such as Starlink or equivalent technologies to guarantee connectivity?
These are not futuristic ideas. They are already in use across Africa, including in fragile and conflict-affected states. The problem is not capacity. The problem is commitment.
Elections must hold because democracy demands it. Leadership’s duty is not to explain why elections may fail, but to ensure that they succeed against all odds.
Senator Akpabio’s address inadvertently revealed the prevailing mindset of too many in our legislative chambers: a class more concerned with self-preservation and elite convenience than national survival. When leaders begin to speak casually about electoral failure, systemic collapse, and insecurity without urgency or accountability it signals something dangerous: a political class preparing for managed instability, not democratic renewal.
This is how republics decay, not in sudden coups, but in shrugs, excuses, and lowered expectations.
Nigeria deserves a Senate that confronts failure with action, not resignation. Nigeria deserves leaders who see insecurity as a call to arms, not an excuse. Nigeria deserves elections that hold despite challenges, not leaders who justify why they should not.
History will not be kind to leaders who watched the house burn and chose to narrate the fire instead of extinguishing it.
The question before us is simple: will the Senate rise to its constitutional duty, or will it continue to normalize national failure?
Nigeria is watching.
The world is watching.
And 2027 is closer than some would like to admit,
Hon. Kenneth Gbandi is a veteran diaspora and ADC Diaspora Leader, at the forefront of sustained advocacy for credible elections, electoral technology reform, and accountable governance in Nigeria.
