Mandating Real-Time Transmission: A Judicial Ambush in Disguise, Says Rotimi Fasan"

 

Some opposition politicians, their supporters and other actors in the civic space on Monday made their way to the National Assembly in protest. They were unhappy that the Senate leadership rejected, as they claim, the position of the majority of the legislators that the results of the forthcoming 2027 elections should be mandatorily transmitted electronically in what they described as ‘real time’. The alleged stance of the Senate leadership was first made public last week in a supposed clarification made during a press briefing convened by the Minority Caucus of the National Assembly led by Senators Enyinnanya Abaribe, Victor Umeh and Ireti Kingibe. It’s only in Nigeria that minority members of a legislature speak in the name of the majority unprompted. This is the stuff of which chaos is made and it was the first sign that something was amiss. 

All Mr. Abaribe and his group set out to do and in fact achieved was at once to lay the foundation for and amplify the false claim that the Senate has rejected Section 60 (5) of the electoral reform bill that made the transmission of election results in so-called real time mandatory. The Senate simply retained what the 2022 Act prescribed. An opposition in need of strategic direction, their bored supporters, together with career agitators and common anarchists; CSOs and their collaborators that must justify every donor fund to the last cent, suddenly found a subject that is downbeat enough to unite them in tearful humour.

Opposition groups protested at the National Assembly after the Senate initially rejected mandatory real-time transmission, viewing it as a setback for transparency.

The reasoning is that the opposition, anticipating defeat in 2027 based on "observable metrics," wants to create grounds for post-election legal challenges. They could then contest results in court by highlighting any discrepancies between real-time uploads and manual/physical collation (e.g., due to network issues), using the strict "real time" requirement as a basis to nullify or dispute outcomes.