A critical legislative meeting meant to resolve deep divisions over Nigeria’s Electoral Act nearly collapsed yesterday after members of the House of Representatives repeatedly failed to show up, forcing senators to wait for hours before a last-ditch night meeting was convened at the Senate President’s Lodge in Maitama.
The Conference Committee tasked with harmonising differences between the Senate and House of Representatives on the Electoral Act (Repeal and Re-enactment) Bill, 2026, was first scheduled for 11am. Senators arrived on time. House members did not. A rescheduled 3pm session met the same fate. By late afternoon, only the two committee chairmen — Senator Simon Lalong and House counterpart Adebayo Balogun — were both present, and even then only for a brief ten-minute closed-door exchange before everyone dispersed. “How can there be a conclusion when the meeting failed to hold?” one senior committee member said bluntly.
The stakes could hardly be higher. With exactly 368 days to the February 20, 2027, general elections, the committee must reconcile 20 contested clauses, including the most explosive one of all: Clause 60(3), which determines whether electronic transmission of election results will be mandatory.
The Ghost of 2023
That question cuts to the heart of a wound Nigeria has never quite closed. In the 2023 presidential election, delays and inconsistencies in uploading results to INEC’s public Result Viewing portal, IReV, ignited street-level fury, prolonged court battles, and a crisis of confidence that no Supreme Court ruling has fully resolved. The court ultimately held that IReV is a transparency tool, not a formal collation system, and that its malfunction could not invalidate the election. But the political and psychological fallout lingered.
Now, with 2027 approaching, analysts describe what faces INEC as a credibility referendum. “The issue is no longer whether technology should be used,” said political analyst Dr. Jide Ojo. “The issue is whether the technology will work transparently and consistently across the board.”
Senate vs. House vs. Telcos
The current legislative battle mirrors an argument that erupted in 2021. Then, as now, the Senate leaned on concerns about inadequate telecommunications infrastructure and frequent power grid failures to resist making electronic transmission compulsory. The House, by contrast, passed the bill with mandatory e-transmission intact.
And then, as now, Nigeria’s major telecom operators hit back hard. MTN Nigeria, Airtel, Globacom, and T2 Mobile have all dismissed the Senate’s position as built on half-truths. Gbenga Adebayo, Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators in Nigeria (ALTON), was blunt: “Over 70% of the country is covered with 3G and 4G. Even 2G is strong enough to transmit results electronically. I do not know where the Senate is getting its information.” He acknowledged that insurgency has made maintenance difficult in a small number of locations, but argued that was a targeted problem to be solved collaboratively, not a justification for a blanket prohibition.
Tech expert Ebenezar Wey went further, pointing out that INEC’s budget is more than sufficient to build the kind of redundant systems — satellite networks, Starlink connections, wide-area networks — that major Nigerian banks already use to serve millions of customers daily. “There’s no excuse that can stand from the point of technology at this time, none,” he said. “The game being played by the politicians is that of self-preservation, because they know that the social contract between themselves and their constituents has been shattered a long time ago.”
Nigeria’s telecom regulator, the NCC, declined to take sides publicly, but a senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity was candid: “The telcos have made enough investments that can get the country to do many things better than other countries we are emulating.”
The numbers bear that out. Broadband penetration has crossed 50%, with over 109.6 million subscriptions recorded by December 2025. MTN alone committed N565.7 billion in the first half of 2025 to network expansion. Airtel activated 2,300 new telecom sites in the first quarter of the same year. The Federal Government is targeting 80% national connectivity by 2027, backed by a plan to expand fibre-optic infrastructure from 35,000km to 125,000km.
What Must Change Before the Votes Are Cast
Beyond the legislative fight, stakeholders have laid out a clear checklist for INEC. On the infrastructure side, experts are calling for dedicated and mirrored servers, real-time failover systems, and cloud backup across multiple locations. Telecom specialists argue that election-day network traffic must be formally prioritised by service providers to prevent the kind of congestion that plagued 2023. “Elections are like banking peak periods,” said one Lagos-based IT consultant. “You don’t experiment on the day of the event.”
On the legal side, civil society groups are pushing for the amended Electoral Act to explicitly mandate real-time transmission, define clear penalties for failure to upload results, and eliminate the grey areas that allowed discretionary interpretations to fuel suspicion last time. A senior Nigerian Bar Association official put it plainly: “Where the law leaves grey areas, politics fills the gap. That must not happen in 2027.”
Observers are also recommending that INEC conduct nationwide public simulation exercises well ahead of the election, inviting political parties, civil society, the media, and independent IT auditors to watch the systems work in real time. Proposals are also gaining traction for a live public dashboard that would show which polling units have uploaded results, along with time stamps and real-time alerts for delays — making the entire process visible and verifiable.
The BVAS technology that reduced multiple voting in 2023 also needs upgrading. INEC sources indicated that, subject to approval of the commission’s combined N1.044 trillion budget for 2026 and 2027, work is underway to improve image compression speeds, strengthen battery life, and enhance offline storage. Intensive training for ad hoc election-day staff is seen as equally essential.
A Question of Trust
Ultimately, analysts warn, no amount of hardware or legislation will be enough if citizens do not believe in the institution deploying them. “Technology does not fail in isolation; institutions fail when citizens do not trust them,” said political scientist Dr. Abubakar Kari. He noted that INEC’s silence during technical disruptions in 2023 significantly worsened public anxiety. “INEC must over-communicate and over-demonstrate transparency.”
Whether 2027 becomes the year Nigeria finally delivers on the promise of credible electronic elections — or simply reopens old wounds — will not be decided on voting day. It will be decided by what legislators agree to in the coming hours, what INEC builds in the coming months, and whether the country’s institutions can earn back trust that was never fully given in the first place.
The night meeting at the Senate President’s Lodge was still ongoing as this report went to press.
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