Akpabio’s Senate as Theatre of the Absurd

Wednesday Column By Egena Sunday Ode

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The Senate did what only the Nigerian Senate can do last week: it declared “no vacancy” in a house that has not been built.

I have always thought theatrics and maybe absurdities are never in short supply in our political space – in and out of election season. In fact, if you ask me, absurdity tops the defining character of Nigerian politics. And if there is a competition for who does it best, the parliament is leading, with the executive and the judiciary trailing behind.

You can’t beat it. I look at today’s Senate and I see members who did not have to participate in a primary to become candidates. My two ready examples are the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, and his predecessor, Ahmad Lawan. Their circumvention of the procedural requirements is well documented. They both contested presidential primaries and ended up as senatorial candidates, matters that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

But as I see it, that was only the curtain raiser.

In the last eight years, I have watched the National Assembly perfect the art of acting in ways that are not in tandem with how you and I believe the legislature should run. Under the 9th Assembly, I watched the Senate gloss over the worsening insecurity in the North-West. When over 200 people were killed in Plateau and Benue within weeks, and bandits levied taxes on farmers in Zamfara and Sokoto, the Senate’s response was a one-day motion, a minute silence, and a prayer. No summon of Service Chiefs that led to anything, no accountability. I also watched the Electoral Act amendment drag till the last minute, with the Senate initially rejecting electronic transmission of results. I watched budgets padded with over N700 billion insertions called constituency projects.

And then I came to the 10th Senate under Akpabio, and the pace quickened.

I have heard Senators complain that executive bills are hardly read before they are passed. I recall Senator Adams Oshiomhole shouting on the floor when four concurrence bills were shared a minute before passage – “We are not meant to be a rubber stamp.” Yet those bills still scaled first, second and third reading on the same day. Not a rubber stamp Senate?

I have also seen that budgets are never really scrutinized. Take the 2024 budget padding allegation. Senator Abdul Ningi raised the alarm that N3.7 trillion could not be traced to any project. What did the Senate do? It suspended Ningi for three months instead of opening the books. For many of us watching, that looked less like loyalty to the President and more like incompetence, or worse, complicity.

Then came what I consider the defining absurdity – the Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan controversy. What started in February 2025 as a simple argument over seating arrangement, I watched degenerate into allegations of sexual harassment against the Senate President, counter-allegations, and a six-month suspension of the Kogi Central Senator. Her salary was cut, her security withdrawn, she was barred from the complex. The court ordered her recall, the Senate stalled. At some point, criminal defamation charges were filed, with Akpabio and Yahaya Bello listed as complainants. Whatever the truth, I thought the optics were terrible. A Senate that could not manage seating arrangement turned itself into a national theatre.

This takes me back to history.

I remember the legislature under former President Olusegun Obasanjo. That Senate became the major opposition to the executive. Perhaps because Obasanjo had pocketed the real opposition. That intra-party rivalry found a comfortable seat in the upper chamber. And the presidency fought back with all its strength, producing the highest turnover of Senate Presidents by a single presidency in our history – from Okadigbo to Anyim to Wabara to Ken Nnamani. Nature, as they say, hates a vacuum.

I see some similarities between Obasanjo and Tinubu in this regard. Whatever their different approaches, they both kept the opposition gasping for breath. But what I find striking, and disappointing, about the present regime is that the parliament has fused itself into the executive.

In Akpabio’s Senate, that fusion is total. I was watching live TV in February 2024 when, during hardship protests, the Senate President announced that money had been sent to Senators to enjoy their recess, before hastily rephrasing it as “prayers have been sent to your mailboxes.” I also heard him announce that governors had received N30 billion each to address hardship, a claim the governors denied and he later apologised for.

So I can argue without mincing words that this 10th Senate appears pitched against the people. Many Nigerians see it as doing the President’s bidding rather than protecting the hapless citizen against punishing policies.

Which is why what happened last week surprised me.

It is this same Senate, lowly rated by the public, that is now audaciously declaring “no vacancy” in the 11th Senate that is yet to be constituted.

Yes, I know parties have already given tickets. Candidates are known. INEC has fixed the parliamentary election for January 16, 2027. But that, to me, is precisely why the declaration is absurd.

The Senators have passed a resolution backing their principal officers for continuity in 2027, when their own re-election is not guaranteed. To me, this is rubbing their disdain for voters on our faces. They are telling us that our verdict on January 16 is already decided.

Isn’t this a joke taken too far?

This is where my mind went to a book we all read in secondary school.

We have seen this film before, not in the National Assembly, but in Amos Tutuola’s 1952 classic, The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Tutuola tells of a man gifted a magic egg in Deads’ Town. An egg that can produce infinite food, palm-wine and money. On his journey home through a famine-stricken land, the Drinkard does not wait for the egg to hatch. He sits in the bush and begins to spend the money in his head. He will sell endless palm-wine, become the richest man, build houses, marry more wives, hire an army of tapsters.

He counted his chicks before the eggs hatched.

That, in my view, is exactly what the Senate did last week. The tickets are in hand, the date is set – January 16, 2027 – but we, the people, have not voted. The egg has not hatched.

The 11th Senate is not a tenement building in Abuja where you can write “No Vacancy.” It is a democratic outcome. Its 109 members will be determined not by a resolution in October 2025, but by ballots on January 16, 2027. By you and me.

To declare no vacancy today is to assume one thing no mortal can guarantee: that Nigerians will re-elect them. It assumes the voter is irrelevant.

Tutuola has a final moral that I have not forgotten. When the Drinkard finally brought the magic egg to his hungry town, the people, in their greedy jubilation, crowded around it, danced around it, and smashed it. All the imagined wealth vanished. The famine continued.

I worry that if the 10th Senate smashes the egg of democracy by declaring no vacancy in a house not yet built, there may be nothing left to inherit on January 16 – not even the legitimacy to claim continuity.

Let the egg hatch. Let us leave January 16 to the voters.