By Sunday Eteh
I remember when Godswill Akpabio was elected Senate President on June 13, 2023. I was watching it on television while getting a haircut in one of the more fancy salons in Owerri, the Imo State capital. The manager of the salon, an Annang woman, was beside herself. She jumped up and down, screamed and hollered until her voice went hoarse. She could not keep it together. She became swollen with pride that, at last, Nigeria had acknowledged her kin. She felt seen. She felt she belonged in Nigeria. Akpabio is the first Annang, nay Akwa Ibom man, to be a presiding officer of the National Assembly. It did not matter one bit that Akpabio was not necessarily the most qualified or the most experienced senator in the 10th Assembly.
He defeated Abdul’aziz Yari by 63 votes to 46 that day, but the contest was a nominal one. The party had already settled the matter, and the senators reluctantly acquiesced. Even Barau Jibrin, who would emerge as Deputy Senate President and who, as we shall see, has now presided over the undoing of Akpabio’s most ambitious overreach, was elected unopposed.
That is the texture of the politics that produced Akpabio. Still, no one tried to foreclose his path through dubious rule changes. His emergence harkened back to his bruising emergence as Senate Minority Leader in his first term in 2015. There were others more suited than him, but the system chose him. Now he wants to blithely shut the door through which he himself came, and to eliminate all contestation for those coming after him.
Such is the irony of Akpabio’s trajectory. Here is a man who has never really had to slough it out. From a middling legal practice, he was saucered into the Akwa Ibom State Executive Council, and from there he inherited the Office of the Governor from his boss, Obong Victor Attah.
After two terms as Governor, he migrated to the Senate and snapped up the top opposition job of Minority Leader, over and above his seniors. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) failed to manage the disaffection that ensued, and this hurried its own demise. Akpabio, having cratered the party, then defected to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and was handed the plum job of Minister of Niger Delta Affairs. From there, he launched a strange double presidential and senatorial bid. When he saw how slim his presidential odds were, he hastened back to his senatorial pursuit amid deep controversy. Despite a litany of scandals dogging him every step of the way, the party gave its blessing, and Akpabio became the president of the 10th Senate.
You can see that since his foray into politics, Akpabio has never really had to face genuine competition for anything. Even where ballots were cast, the outcomes were arranged elsewhere. And so he arrogates to himself the smartness and nimbleness of the monkey, forgetting that the trees are just near one another.
Now he wants to make others look less fortunate or less industrious because, in truth, the good spirits have cracked his kernel for him.
This is the spirit in which one must read the events of Tuesday, May 5, 2026. On that day, the Senate amended its standing orders to restrict eligibility for presiding and principal offices to senators who have served at least two consecutive terms. The amendment, adopted by voice vote under Akpabio’s gavel, came amid open speculation that former Senators Hope Uzodimma, Ifeanyi Okowa and Ovie Omo-Agege are weighing a return to the Red Chamber, and a possible bid for the Senate presidency in 2027.
The revised rules stipulated that only senators in the current 10th Senate who secured re-election into the 11th in 2027 would be eligible to contest for the positions of Senate President and Deputy Senate President. Order 5 went further, providing that no senator shall be eligible to contest for any principal office unless he has served at least two consecutive terms immediately preceding nomination.
The whole thing centred on Obot and his perceived opposition. You cannot tell me that all those shouting “aye” on Tuesday are guaranteed a return, much less a place in the 11th Senate. That is pure delusion. And yet, on the strength of that delusion, the Senate was stampeded into rewriting its own foundational document more than a year before the next inauguration.
Has the Nigerian Senate ever amended its standing rules regarding the election of presiding or principal officers more than a year to the inauguration of the next Senate? The history is thin, and what little there is does not flatter the Tuesday exercise. Senate standing rules are meant to be neutral instruments. They are not personal weapons.
How, after all, does the Senate elect its presiding officers? By a vote of the senators-elect themselves, before they take the oath of office. The order is unambiguous in the Standing Orders. The election of the Senate President and Deputy Senate President is the first business of a new Senate, conducted under the gavel of the Clerk of the National Assembly, and it precedes the swearing-in of members. The senators-elect vote first; they swear in afterwards. To insert a clause that disqualifies the majority of incoming senators-elect before they have even cast their votes is to invert that order. It substitutes a clique for a chamber. It cannot stand the test of reason, and as we now know, it could not even stand the test of 48 hours.
Could Tuesday’s amendment not be read as Akpabio acting in bad faith, clearly trying to tip the rules in his favour, knowing that his biggest opponent for the seat of Senate President is not really the person of Governor Uzodimma, but what his candidacy represents. Akpabio sees Uzodimma as his most serious threat for a reason that has nothing to do with arithmetic and everything to do with meaning.
An Uzodimma Senate presidency would be the natural and logical climax of a legislative and gubernatorial career spent pulling his people out from parochial politics into the national mainstream. Few politicians from the South East have walked that road as deliberately as Uzodimma has. From his years in the Senate, where he built relationships across the geopolitical zones rather than retreat into regional grievance, to his governorship of Imo State, where he has positioned the state as a serious participant in national conversations rather than a complainant on the sidelines, his trajectory has been one long argument against the politics of isolation.
Nigerians see in his potential candidacy the reward for that argument. Akpabio sees in it the end of his own. That is why he could not sleep. And it is why, on Wednesday, the day between the rule and its undoing, he lost his composure on the floor of the chamber.
When Senator Adams Oshiomhole rose repeatedly to seek a point of order during the adoption of Tuesday’s Votes and Proceedings, Akpabio did not engage him as a colleague raising a concern. He warned him. He threatened him. “Senator Oshiomhole, if any member becomes unruly in the Senate, such a member will be asked to leave. This is the final warning.”
That is the language of a man who knows that the ground has shifted beneath him and who is trying to keep his footing through the volume of his voice. No wonder the Chief Whip was summoned. Orji Uzor Kalu was wheeled in to recite the rule book. The whole apparatus of the chamber was mobilised against a single dissenting voice because that single voice knew, as did everyone in that chamber, that the Tuesday amendment would not survive, and the man who pushed it through had overplayed his hand.
Does Obot hear himself talk? Would he have been Senate Minority Leader, or indeed Senate president, had these apartheid rules been slipped in by his predecessors, some of whom were more ambitious than he is? The very offices he holds today are the products of a system that left its doors open. He walked through those open doors. He now wants to bolt them behind him.
But one also wonders how this sits with the party. Having pretended to be an ally of the President and a champion of the APC, is he now trying to hoist his own flag as a rebel for a personal cause? Is Akpabio prepared to risk the cohesion of the ruling party, and ridicule the President himself, over his vaulting ambition to be Senate president for eight years? Because that is what is at stake. The President is the leader of the party. The party will, in the final analysis, point the way to who emerges as the next Senate president. To pre-empt that process by amending the rules is to insult the leadership of the party and to embarrass the man at the top.
It is clear that Uzodimma has become the object of Akpabio’s fantasy. Ever since Uzodimma hinted at a return to the Senate, Akpabio has lost sleep, even as he purports to laugh and jest at the prospect in public. You look at Akpabio and you see a man who has allowed praise to enter his head, and fear to enter his heart.
And then came Thursday, May 7, 2026. Two days after the so-called amendment, the Senate reversed itself. And here is where things get ominous for Akpabio. The motion of reversal was sponsored by the Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele. The Senate Leader is the floor general of the ruling party. He does not move against the gavel of his own Senate president without instruction, or at least without permission, from above. That the motion came from him, and not from the minority or “opposition”, tells you that Obot has fallen out of step with his own party. The script was no longer his to write.
Thursday’s plenary was presided over by Deputy Senate President Jibrin Barau, the same man who, two years earlier, had been ushered to his seat unopposed. The Number Two had taken the gavel to undo the Number One. Such a quiet, piercing humiliation. Bamidele told the chamber that the Tuesday amendments could, on further legislative and constitutional review, result in constitutional inconsistencies and unintended tensions. Senator Adams Oshiomhole, who had been the lone dissenting voice on Tuesday, sought to revisit his earlier position. He was ruled out of order. Bamidele then urged him not to continue what he called “drama” on the floor.
The drama, of course, was not Oshiomhole’s. The drama was the spectacle of a Senate president who pushed through a self-serving rule on Tuesday and watched it dismantled by his own party’s leader on Thursday, with his own deputy holding the gavel. That is the sequence that should sober Obot. He would have known, in the days between Tuesday and Thursday, that the call had gone out from the party. He would have known the motion was coming. He would have known who would move it, and who would preside. The system simply showed him, unmistakably, that he is a tenant in that chamber, not the landlord.
So we return to where we began. Obot has never really had to compete. He has been saucered through every office he has held. He mistakes that record of effortless ascent for political genius, when in truth it is mostly the favour of others. The Tuesday rule was the work of a man who has confused luck with skill, and praise with permission. The Thursday reversal is the verdict of a system that, despite all its flaws, still occasionally remembers itself.
The Akwa Ibom woman in the salon was not wrong to scream that day in 2023. She was right to feel seen. But pride of kinship places its own demand on the kinsman. He who climbed through the open door owes those still climbing the courtesy of leaving it open. Beware, Obot Akpabio. The trees are indeed near one another. And the kernel was never yours.
. Eteh is a public affairs analyst based in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital.