In the second week of February 2026, Nigerian Senators voted against the use of Electronic Transmission of Vote Results from polling centers...
In the second week of February 2026, Nigerian Senators voted against the use of Electronic Transmission of Vote Results from polling centers to viewing portals (IREV). The decision to return to manual transmission of results stemmed from the long-pending Electoral Bill, which the masses depended on for a transparent electoral process.
The PDP government under Goodluck Ebele Jonathan had invested a large amount of money to procure the Electronic equipment. Sadly, this APC government, which has zero tolerance for transparency, has set it aside so that they can manipulate Election results using the INEC and willing Security agencies.
The Senate has explained that empirical data on Nigeria's communication and power infrastructure guided its decision to make electronic transmission of election results discretionary rather than mandatory in the Electoral Bill, 2026. In a statement issued on Sunday by the Directorate of Media and Public Affairs, the Leader of the Senate, Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, said the decision was not driven by emotion or sentiment but by the country's infrastructural realities.
The opposition parties and the Nigerian public were concerned about Section 60(3), which grants "undefined discretionary powers" to presiding officers regarding the electronic transmission of results. They said that the section negates the purpose of introducing electronic transmission of election results from polling units.
"This negation is unambiguously intended to provide a blank cheque to those who seek to manipulate election results by delaying the electronic transmission of results from the polling units to the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IREV) on the pretext of network failure. "The premise of the proviso in Section 60(3) is the unavailability or possibility of network failure. They found this premise dubious and inconsistent with reality.
A concerned citizen cited data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) that indicates over 95 per cent 2G coverage across the country. He added that the immediate past INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, had once said that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), which operates offline, had achieved an over 90 per cent success rate nationwide.
"Yakubu also noted that in the event of network failure at the point of transmission, the transmitted results would be delivered successfully whenever the network is available," he said. Sadly, Nigeria's rubber-stamp Senate President didn't waste time validating the fraudulent Bill and forwarded it to the insensitive President of Nigeria, who quickly signed it into Law.
What is the hope of the poor masses who are at the receiving end of all these criminalities? If the votes of the masses are worthless, then the country has become irredeemable, as corrupt Politicians will continue to turn in their cronies into places of Power.
As the masses rolled into the National Assembly complex to protest over this evil, the government rolled out the Police to attack and use teargas on them. The only solution to fixing Nigeria is disintegration. The Biafra nation is long overdue.
We seek a Referendum to exit from this decay.
Written by
Esther Udofia
Edited by
Onyekachi Mboma
For State Media Team
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