Of Lawmakers, Compradors, and Pseudo-Patriots
Beneath the Surface By Dakuku Peterside
On a quiet Tuesday evening, as the sun sank behind Nigeria’s skyline, the National Assembly committed a small, efficient act of cruelty against the nation’s democratic conscience. What should have been a protective update to the electoral framework—law as a shield for the weakest voter—was reshaped into law as an insurance policy for the strongest incumbent. In a rush that felt more like coordination than governance, the harmonised report on the Electoral Act amendment—complete with the contentious Section 60(3)—was passed with startling speed, and presidential assent followed almost immediately amid controversy. The message was not subtle: when the political class is threatened by transparency, urgency suddenly becomes possible.
Nigeria has seen this theatre before. We have watched lawmakers wrap private advantage in public language. We have watched “reforms” arrive pre-negotiated, rehearsed, and delivered with solemn faces. Yet this episode is unusually clarifying because it collapses the distance between what citizens suspect and what institutions now appear willing to formalise. The stage is built with public funds: the chambers, the microphones, the convoys, the allowances, the comfort. But the script increasingly reads like a compact among elites—signed with the ink of procedure and paid for by citizens whose only demand is simple: let the vote mean what it says.
A legislature earns legitimacy by translating citizens’ voices into enforceable rules. That is the moral basis of representation. The National Assembly is meant to be the place where the noise of the streets is refined into the discipline of policy. Instead, it is too often the place where the urgency of the people is diluted into loopholes, and the public interest is bargained away for political survival. When a law governing elections is weakened—when it is designed to expand ambiguity rather than reduce it—what is being attacked is not a clause but the social contract itself. Democracy cannot breathe in a room where outcomes are negotiated before ballots are counted.
At the centre of this crisis is a question that should not be controversial in any serious republic: how do we make rigging harder? Nigerians across regions, religions, and party lines share a rare consensus. They want elections that can be trusted. They want accreditation and collation processes that leave minimal room for manipulation. They want results that move from polling unit to public record without disappearing into shadows. This is not a luxury demand; it is the foundation of civic peace. Yet the amendment process, as executed, appears to do the opposite. Rather than tighten the screws on fraud, it loosens them. Rather than reduce discretion, it multiplies it. Rather than close the familiar doors through which elections are stolen, it refurbishes them and calls it pragmatism.
The sequence of events reads like a three-act play.
Act one was the House of Representatives, once romanticised as the more citizen-sensitive chamber. In what can only be described as a retreat dressed up as a procedure, the House abandoned its earlier posture in favour of a version that preserves a pathway for manual handling of what Nigerians have repeatedly demanded be made tamper-resistant. In a country where “manual” has become a synonym for discretion, and discretion has become a synonym for abuse, this is not a neutral compromise. It is a surrender—an invitation to the old craft of “corrections,” “adjustments,” and mysterious figures that arrive after the votes have been cast. It is the return of the familiar magician, now authorised to wear a badge.
Act two was the rhetorical laundering of that retreat. The new orthodoxy is “realism”: allow electronic transmission, yes—but keep manual processes as a fallback when “the system fails.” On paper, that sounds like common sense. In practice, it is an engineered trapdoor. Because in Nigeria, systems have a habit of failing at precisely the moments when failure benefits the powerful. A manual option does not protect the voter; it protects the politician. It converts a technical exception into a strategic instrument. It creates a legal alibi in advance, so that what should be investigated as fraud can be explained away as a malfunction.
Act three came from the executive. President Bola Tinubu’s swift assent—coming so quickly it seemed to outrun public scrutiny—lands in a wider pattern Nigerians are learning to recognise: when democratic safeguards demand patience, patience disappears. The state becomes allergic to questions. And assent, rather than being the final reflective step of a constitutional process, becomes a stamp applied with the impatience of those who do not expect to be held accountable. The political meaning is unmistakable: the rules of the contest will be adjusted by those who intend to win it, and the public may argue afterwards.
This is the point at which the nation must ask the simplest and most uncomfortable question: whose agency do our legislators truly represent? The citizens’, or the incumbents’? The public interest, or the party’s arithmetic? The republic’s long-term stability, or the politician’s short-term survival?
When lawmakers treat transparency as optional, they are not merely betraying voters; they are weakening the very institution that gives them authority. The social contract is uncomplicated: citizens grant legitimacy through votes and taxes; leaders return value through representation, accountability, and governance. When electoral laws are redesigned to make cheating easier to excuse and harder to prove, that contract is broken. And a broken contract does not simply reduce turnout; it raises the temperature of the republic. It turns elections into rituals without trust. It turns politics into warfare by other means.
The greater danger is not only the content of the amendment but the speed and manner of its passage. Process is not decoration; process is protection. When safeguards can be revised in a hurry, the public learns a terrible lesson: democratic infrastructure can be remodelled at the convenience of the powerful. The normalisation of rushed erosion is how democracies are hollowed out—not by one dramatic coup, but by a sequence of tidy edits, each defended as minor, technical, and necessary. Citizens are expected to accept each reduction in clarity as maturity, each new loophole as flexibility, each new discretion as practical governance. That is how pseudo-patriotism works: it speaks the language of the nation while quietly transferring power from the people to the gatekeepers.
The likely consequences are already visible on the horizon. One is withdrawal: citizens, tired of participating in contests that feel pre-arranged, may boycott 2027, choosing emotional self-defence over civic duty. The other is resignation: people may show up, but only as witnesses to an outcome they expect to be managed. In either case, the result is the same: democracy survives as an appearance while dying as a substance. Polling units may open. Campaign songs may blare. Debates may be televised. But the essential thing—a public belief that votes are counted as cast—will have been punctured again.
This is why the response cannot be casual or delayed.
Civil society must refuse the lazy comfort of “this is the best we can get.” There is nothing inevitable about loopholes. There is nothing patriotic about ambiguity in the rules that decide leadership. Advocacy must focus on what citizens actually asked for: clarity that prioritises electronic transmission and narrows discretion, not wording that expands the room for post-election improvisation.
The diaspora, too often reduced to observers with nostalgia, should become amplifiers with strategy—using platforms, networks, and influence to insist that Nigeria’s elections must not remain a local tragedy with global embarrassment.
And the judiciary must understand what moment it is being invited into. Courts are not merely arbiters of disputes; they are guardians of democratic boundaries. Where citizens challenge the constitutionality and legality of these changes, the judiciary must resist the slow seduction of becoming a procedural accomplice to substantive injustice.
Most importantly, ordinary Nigerians must stop playing the role of an audience to a drama financed by their own hardship. Civic power is not an abstraction. It is petitions, town halls, organised pressure, coordinated litigation, vigilant monitoring, sustained public argument, and peaceful insistence that sovereignty is not a decorative word in a constitution—it is a lived claim.
If citizens do not contest this new architecture of ambiguity, the stage built with their money will continue to be used against them. The actors will perform with the confidence that the audience has nowhere else to go. And Nigeria’s democratic project will drift further into the familiar abyss: managed elections, orchestrated outcomes, and pseudo-patriotic theatrics—conducted in the name of a people who are steadily being trained to doubt that their voice matters at all.
•Dakuku Peterside is the author of two bestselling books, Leading in a Storm, and Beneath the Surface,
