By Kenneth Gbandi
The Senate’s re-amendment of the Electoral Act on electronic transmission of results is not a technical fix; it is a calculated regression. Worse still, it embeds ambiguity so deep that it converts uncertainty into a governing principle of Nigeria’s electoral process ahead of 2027.
At the heart of the re-amendment lies a dangerous contradiction. While electronic transmission is nominally acknowledged, it is effectively subordinated to a manual fallback that becomes dominant the moment “internet failure” is declared. In such circumstances, Form EC8A physically transported from polling units to collation centres becomes the primary determinant of results. This is not modernization; it is a return to the most compromised stage of Nigeria’s electoral history.
What makes this re-amendment particularly troubling is that the Senate President, Senator Godswill Akpabio, has already laid the predicate for its abuse. On national television, he admitted that at least nine states suffer network blackouts due to insecurity and further warned of possible power grid collapse. When the chief legislative officer publicly predicts systemic failure, the law he shepherds must be examined not as neutral legislation but as pre-emptive justification.
In electoral jurisprudence, clarity is not optional. Laws governing elections must be deterministic, not conditional. By tying electronic transmission to subjective assessments of connectivity and power availability without objective thresholds, independent verification, or real-time audit trails the Senate has created a legal loophole wide enough to swallow the popular will.
The “Jerusalem to Jericho” journey of Form EC8A is not a metaphor; it is a lived Nigerian reality. It is along this journey between polling unit and collation centre that results have historically been altered, substituted, delayed, or outright manufactured. To elevate this vulnerable manual process above real-time electronic transmission is to institutionalize risk rather than mitigate it.
Globally, electronic transmission is not adopted because it is perfect; it is adopted because it minimizes human discretion at the most sensitive point of elections. Where connectivity challenges exist, democracies invest in redundancy offline uploads, encrypted storage, timestamped synchronization not in a wholesale reversion to paper dominance.
The Senate’s re-amendment does the opposite. It converts infrastructural weakness into a legal excuse, and legal excuse into a political weapon. In doing so, it shifts elections from being a contest of votes to a contest of logistics, security narratives, and discretionary declarations of “failure.”
This is why the new law is worse than the old one. The previous version was flawed but directional. The re-amended version is retrogressive by design. It does not merely weaken electoral credibility; it normalizes distrust before a single vote is cast.
If 2023 taught Nigerians anything, it is that ambiguity in election law always benefits the most powerful actors, never the voter. A law that anticipates failure instead of preventing it is not reform. It is a trap carefully laid, legally dressed, and dangerously timed for 2027.
Nigeria does not need prophetic warnings of collapse from its leaders. It needs laws that make collapse impossible, manipulation difficult, and the will of the people final. Anything less is not democracy, it is managed uncertainty masquerading as legislation.
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.
