The House of Representatives descended into a shouting match on Tuesday during an emergency plenary presided over by Speaker Tajudeen Abbas.
The session was convened to debate a contentious motion: rescinding the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill, 2025, which the House had originally passed in December 2025.
Persecondnews reports that the motion was introduced by Rep. Francis Waive (Rules and Business) and seconded by Rep. Adebayo Balogun (Electoral Matters).
Waive argued that a technical review involving legal experts and leadership from both chambers had uncovered “anomalies” in the bill’s harmonized version.
To protect electoral timelines and public trust, he insisted the bill be recommitted to the Committee of the Whole for urgent corrections.
The session, however, turned volatile when Speaker Abbas put the motion to a voice vote. Despite a thunderous “Nay” from the majority of lawmakers present, but the Speaker ruled in favour of the “Ayes.”
This decision immediately triggered an uproar, particularly among the minority caucus, who appeared to outnumber the supporters in the sparsely attended chamber.
The lawmakers flooded the floor in protest while a heated exchange was caught between Abubakar Yalleman (Jigawa) and Bamidele Salam (Osun), though the specifics of their argument were drowned out by the noise.
As the disorder escalated, the House retreated into a closed-door executive session.
Meanwhile, plenary remains suspended as leadership attempts to manage the fallout.
The heart of the deadlock lies in a fundamental disagreement between the House and Senate over real-time election result transmission.
While the House version mandates that results be sent electronically from polling units to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (iReV) to reduce human interference, the Senate version includes a “manual fallback” clause.
This Senate provision allows for traditional manual transmission in areas where poor infrastructure or technical failures prevent electronic uploads.
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