A chieftain of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Kenneth Okonkwo, has urged the Senate to completely remove any clause allowing manual transmission of results in the Electoral Act, insisting that electronic transmission from polling units must be made mandatory to ensure electoral integrity.
Okonkwo, a lawyer and actor-turned-politician, made the appeal during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Tuesday, amid nationwide backlash trailing the passage of the Electoral Act Amendment Bill by the Senate.
“Once they put that law that you must transmit from the polling unit, I am okay. So any polling officer would not leave the polling unit,” Okonkwo stated.
He also called on the House of Representatives to go a step further by making provisions for nullifying elections in areas where electronic transmission fails.
“The House of Representatives should go further to say that where it is not possible to transmit from the polling unit, that election should be cancelled,” he added.
Asked whether cancelling such elections would be fair to voters in affected areas, Okonkwo responded that the purpose of accreditation and voting is to produce a credible result, and any process that ends in a manipulated outcome should be invalidated.
He said, “The reason you are doing accreditation and voting is for the result. If you do all these things to get a fraudulent result, what have you gained? You have actually emboldened the criminals.
“The only problem we have in this country is fraudulent elections. On the day we have free and fair elections in Nigeria, 20 years after that, we would become a superpower nation.”
Okonkwo emphasised that democracy must transcend party lines and urged Nigerians to resist any attempt to erode democratic gains.
“Democracy is not the government of the ADC or APC; it is the government of the people. We must fight for the sustenance of democracy,” he declared.
His comments come in the wake of sustained protests at the National Assembly and heavy criticism from civil society organisations, opposition leaders, and youth groups over the Senate’s initial decision to remove the phrase “real-time” from the clause mandating electronic transmission of election results.
Last week, the Senate passed the Electoral Act 2022 (Repeal and Reenactment) Amendment Bill, 2026, sparking outrage over what many perceived as an attempt to weaken electoral transparency.
While the bill retained INEC’s discretion to determine the mode of result transmission, the mandatory real-time transmission clause was dropped.
However, during an emergency session on Tuesday, the Senate reversed itself by approving electronic transmission, without explicitly reinstating the “real-time” requirement. It also stated that where internet connectivity fails, the manually filled Form EC8A would serve as the primary record of election results.
Lawmakers have since constituted a committee to harmonise the Senate version of the bill with that of the House of Representatives, as public pressure mounts on the National Assembly to uphold electoral credibility ahead of the 2027 general elections.