There is a particular species of Nigerian political theatre that deserves its own taxonomy. It is not corruption, that is too obvious. It is not incompetence, that is too universal. It is something far more exquisite: the solemn, elaborate, and expensive performance of doing something that cannot legally be done, while being surrounded by lawyers who know it cannot be done.
The Nigerian Senate has just delivered a textbook specimen.
On Tuesday, the 10th Senate emerged from a marathon closed-door session, one imagines senators hunched over tables like constitutional surgeons, and announced, with great fanfare, that it had amended its standing orders to restrict eligibility for the office of Senate President to members of the 10th Senate. Specifically, only senators who have served two terms, with one of those terms being the immediate preceding term, may contest for principal offices in the next Senate.
Translation: only current senators who win re-election get to play in the next Senate’s leadership elections.
It is, in the words of an imaginary but very wise professor, “constitutionally adorable.”
What the Constitution Actually Says
Let us begin, as all legal analysis should, with the text.
Section 50(1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) is embarrassingly clear:
“There shall be a President and a Deputy President of the Senate, who shall be elected by the members of that House from among themselves.”
Three words carry all the weight: “that House.” Not the previous House. Not the House that existed before the elections. That House, the one currently constituted, the one whose members are sitting in those chambers after the general election, the one whose very existence extinguishes, as a matter of law and political fact, the one that came before it.
The 11th Senate will be that House. The 10th Senate, by the time those elections are conducted, will be a historical artefact, a Wikipedia entry, a set of retirement benefits, and a collection of carefully preserved grievances.
Section 60 of the same Constitution reinforces this. It grants the Senate, again, the Senate, not a previous Senate, the power to regulate its own procedure. This is not a transferable power. It is not a gift that one Senate bequeaths to another like a family heirloom. It is an institutional power that vests afresh in each new legislative body upon its constitution. When the 11th Senate is inaugurated, it inherits the constitutional power, not the constitutional obligations, of its predecessor.
What the 10th Senate has done, in essence, is attempt to reach from its own constitutional grave and rearrange the furniture in a house it no longer owns.
The First Rule of a New Parliament
There is an iron convention, observed across Westminster systems, American congressional practice, and most functioning parliaments on earth, that the very first order of business of any new legislative chamber is the adoption of its own rules of procedure.
This is not courtesy. It is not mere habit. It is a constitutional necessity that flows directly from the doctrine that no parliament can bind its successors.
The 11th Senate will convene. Someone will move the adoption of standing orders. Those standing orders will be debated and passed. At that precise moment, whatever the 10th Senate inscribed in its own standing orders about who gets to run for what becomes legally irrelevant, not because anyone chose to ignore it, but because the 11th Senate, exercising its own sovereign procedural authority under Section 60, will have superseded it.
It is, if you will forgive the analogy, like a departing tenant repainting the walls in colours he knows the landlord hates, confident it will matter. It will not. The new tenant redecorates.
The Constitutional Doctrine: Parliamentary Sovereignty and the Non-Bindability of Successors
The proposition that no parliament can bind its successors is one of the most ancient and fundamental principles of parliamentary democracy. It is not controversial. It is not a radical legal theory. It is as settled as the proposition that courts interpret statutes.
The United Kingdom
The United Kingdom is where this principle was most famously articulated and most rigorously tested. A.V. Dicey, whose Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885) remains essential reading for anyone with a pulse and a law degree, formulated the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty in terms that are directly relevant here. Parliament, Dicey held, has the right to make or unmake any law; and no person or body, including a previous Parliament, is recognised by the law as having the right to override or set aside its legislation.
The courts confirmed this in Vauxhall Estates Ltd v Liverpool Corporation [1932] 1 KB 733 and Ellen Street Estates Ltd v Minister of Health [1934] 1 KB 590, where the Court of Appeal held that Parliament cannot bind itself or its successors as to the form or content of future legislation. Lord Justice Maugham put it plainly: Parliament cannot, by one enactment, so bind itself or its successors that they cannot repeal that enactment.
More practically: each new Parliament at Westminster begins by adopting its own Standing Orders. These are debated, amended, and passed at the start of every new parliamentary session. The idea that the 2019-2024 Parliament could dictate the internal rules of the 2024-2029 Parliament, which is effectively what Nigeria’s 10th Senate has attempted, would be regarded at Westminster with the kind of polite bewilderment reserved for people who turn up to black-tie dinners in cargo shorts.
The United States Congress
American constitutional practice is, if anything, even more explicit. Each new Congress, the 118th, the 119th, and so on, is treated as an entirely new legislative body. One of the first acts of every new House of Representatives is a floor vote to adopt the rules for that Congress. These rules do not carry over automatically from the previous Congress. They are affirmatively adopted, debated, and sometimes hotly contested.
The House Freedom Caucus has, on more than one occasion in recent years, leveraged this procedural moment to extract remarkable concessions from House Speaker candidates, most memorably in January 2023, when the House took fifteen ballots to elect Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, with the rules adoption serving as the primary bargaining chip. The lesson is not merely that rules matter. It is that each new House owns its rules entirely, and no prior House can dictate those rules in advance.
The U.S. Senate has a slightly different tradition, it considers itself a “continuing body” because only one-third of its members are up for election in any cycle, but even there, Senate rules cannot be imposed by a previous congressional session on the substantive choices of a new one.
South Africa
Closer to home, South Africa’s National Assembly, under Section 57 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, is empowered to “determine and control its internal arrangements, proceedings and procedures.” Section 57(2) explicitly states that the rules and orders of the Assembly must provide for the participation of minority parties in the Assembly’s business. Each new National Assembly, upon its constitution after elections, adopts its own rules. The principle is the same: the new chamber inherits the constitutional power to self-govern, not the substantive rules of its predecessor.
Kenya
Kenya’s experience is instructive because it is constitutionally recent and explicitly designed to avoid the kind of institutional manipulation Nigeria’s 10th Senate is now attempting. Under Article 124 of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, each House of Parliament may establish committees and make rules for the regulation of its own procedure. The key word, again, is “each House”, meaning the one that currently exists, not the ghost of a previous one.
The Kenyan Parliament specifically adopted this language to ensure that each incoming assembly begins with a clean slate on procedural matters, precisely so that outgoing majorities cannot entrench rules that disadvantage incoming compositions of the legislature.
Why This Specific Amendment Is Particularly Futile
Beyond the general principle, there are specific structural reasons why this amendment will not survive contact with the 11th Senate.
First, standing orders are not constitutional provisions. They are not entrenched. They do not require a supermajority to amend. On Day One of the 11th Senate, a simple majority can move to adopt new standing orders that say absolutely nothing about two-term requirements, and those new standing orders will immediately and completely displace whatever the 10th Senate passed in its moment of optimistic self-importance.
Second, political realities change. The 10th Senate is attempting to freeze a political configuration, presumably one that favours a particular set of incumbents, into the next legislative cycle. But Nigerian political alignments shift with a fluidity that makes continental drift look sluggish. By the time the 11th Senate is seated, the alliances that motivated this amendment may have been entirely rearranged. The senators who were to benefit may find themselves on the wrong side of new calculations.
Third, and most fundamentally, the senators of the 11th Senate will be freshly elected representatives of the Nigerian people. Their democratic mandate derives from the electorate, not from the standing orders of a body that no longer exists. The idea that their choice of presiding officers should be pre-determined by their predecessors is not just legally unsound. It is constitutionally offensive to the representative principle itself.
A Word on the Political Subtext
One does not need a particularly sophisticated political antenna to detect what is really happening here. Standing orders do not get amended in marathon closed-door sessions for abstract reasons of parliamentary tidiness. Someone wants to be Senate President. Someone else wants to ensure that certain other people cannot be Senate President. The two-term requirement is not a good-governance initiative, it is a gate, and the people installing the gate already know which side they intend to be on.
This is not unusual. Outgoing parliamentary majorities have attempted similar manoeuvres in various jurisdictions. What is unusual, or rather, what is distinctly Nigerian, is the confidence with which it is announced as settled business, as though constitutional doctrine were a minor inconvenience to be overcome by sufficient self-assurance.
It is the legislative equivalent of writing your own name in someone else’s will.
Conclusion: The Mirror Has Two Faces
The 10th Senate’s amendment is not without value. It tells us something useful, not about the next Senate, but about this one, specifically, about who fears the composition of the next chamber and why.
But as a legal instrument, it is a sandcastle built at the water’s edge. The 11th Senate will arrive. The tide will come in. Members will convene, they will adopt their rules, they will elect their presiding officers, and they will do all of this under the full authority of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, an authority that no previous Senate, however determined, can dilute, redirect, or pre-empt.
The first rule of a new Parliament is always the same: we make our own rules.
The 10th Senate, for all its procedural industry, has simply provided the 11th Senate with an early opportunity to demonstrate that it understands this.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 