By Sam Agogo
Since Godswill Akpabio ascended to the Presidency of the Nigerian Senate in June 2023, the red chamber has been shaped as much by his temperament as by its legislative agenda. A pattern has emerged across successive plenary sessions: senators raising points of order, motions, or objections are frequently met not with procedural accommodation but with sharp rebuke, and in several documented instances, with explicit threats of removal from the chamber. For an institution that prides itself on being a house of equals, the manner in which its presiding officer addresses his fellow "distinguished senators" has become one of the most closely watched, and increasingly contested, features of his leadership.
The clearest and most repeated example involves Senator Adams Oshiomhole, the former Edo State governor and a man not known for backing down from a fight. In May 2026, during a routine reading of the Votes and Proceedings, Oshiomhole repeatedly interjected with cries of "Point of Order," defying the Senate's own rule that such interruptions are not permitted at that stage of business. Akpabio, rather than simply overruling him and moving on, chose confrontation. "If you are a soldier, you behave like a soldier. If you are a police officer, you behave like a police officer. So if you are a senator, you must go by the rules," he told Oshiomhole, before ruling him out of order and striking the gavel. When Oshiomhole persisted, Akpabio escalated further: "If any member becomes unruly in the Senate, such a member will be asked to leave. This is the final warning." Later in the same exchange, he was blunter still, telling Oshiomhole he could "take him out of the chamber" if he failed to comport himself with Senate procedure. It was the second time in recent memory Akpabio had publicly threatened to have Oshiomhole physically removed from the floor, and observers noted it came amid a simmering rivalry between the two men tied to the contest for Senate leadership ahead of 2027.
Oshiomhole is far from the only colleague to feel the weight of the gavel. Senator Ali Ndume of Borno South stormed out of plenary as early as October 2023 after Akpabio ruled him out of order mid-debate, accusing the Senate President of disregarding standing rules and presiding with bias — a clash that preceded Ndume's removal as Senate Chief Whip by his own party. A month later, in November 2023, Senator Tony Nwoye of Anambra North confronted Akpabio on the floor after the Senate President unilaterally reassigned minority leadership positions, standing to point directly across the chamber and accusing Akpabio of trying to turn independent lawmakers into puppets. Senator Abdul Ningi of Bauchi Central paid the heaviest price of all: after alleging in March 2024 that the 2024 budget had been padded by ₦3.7 trillion, the Senate — on a motion supported from the floor — suspended him for three months, a punishment only reversed after public pressure and legal threats from the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project. Senator Ireti Kingibe of the FCT staged her own dramatic walkout in December 2024, packing her belongings and storming out of the chamber after Akpabio blocked her motion on the demolition of estates in Abuja under Minister Nyesom Wike; she returned only after colleagues intervened and was made to apologise before her motion was finally heard. And in March 2025, during the closed-door debate over the state of emergency declared in Rivers State, senators Seriake Dickson, Aminu Tambuwal and Enyinnaya Abaribe all walked out in protest after being denied an open floor debate on what they called an unconstitutional suspension of elected officials — Dickson later accusing Akpabio of intimidation in the lead-up to that session.
Even Akpabio's own lieutenants have not escaped the friction. Immediate past Senate President Ahmed Lawan clashed with him openly on the floor in July 2024 over a rule change shifting plenary resumption from 10am to 11am, calling the justification unscientific and unconvincing, a disagreement serious enough to force the Senate into an emergency closed-door session to settle it. In November 2024, a report alleging a physical altercation between Akpabio and his own Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, circulated widely enough that Bamidele was compelled to issue a public denial, dismissing it as fabrication from what he called a "cash-and-carry journalist" — the Senate leadership has never confirmed the incident occurred. And by mid-2025, whispers of internal dissatisfaction with Akpabio's handling of the chamber had grown loud enough that Senator Orji Uzor Kalu found himself publicly denying, on Akpabio's behalf, that any colleagues were plotting to remove him from office.
Then there is the case that did the most damage to Akpabio's public standing: his running dispute with Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan of Kogi Central. In July 2024, after she spoke during plenary without being formally recognised, Akpabio told her, "You cannot speak without being asked or invited to speak in the Senate. This is not a nightclub." The remark, condemned by women's groups as sexist and demeaning, forced a rare public apology days later, in which Akpabio insisted he "meant no harm" but also complained about the volume of abuse it had brought his household. The peace did not last. By February 2025, the two clashed again — this time over a reassigned Senate seat, an episode that ended with the Sergeant-at-Arms ordered to remove her from her chair — and by March, the Senate had voted to suspend Akpoti-Uduaghan for six months over allegations she had made against Akpabio, a punishment a Federal High Court later ruled unconstitutional and excessive, ordering her reinstatement.
Senator Garba Maidoki of Kebbi South, more recently in the news for his defection from the APC to the ADC, has had his own moments on the floor with Akpabio, though the record here is more measured than dramatic. During a debate on traditional medicine legislation, Maidoki's remarks about native doctors interceding with ancestors drew a teasing response from Akpabio rather than open hostility. Still, colleagues who have watched the pattern of exchanges in the red chamber say Maidoki's experience fits a broader mould — senators who raise uncomfortable subjects, whether insecurity in their states or grievances with their parties, often find themselves gently but firmly steered back into line by a Senate President who keeps tight control of who speaks, when, and how.
It is against this backdrop that Akpabio's public commentary on Nigeria's youth deserves scrutiny. Addressing the wave of kidnappings sweeping the country in June 2026, he suggested that opposition figures, unable to attack the government's record, had resorted to "paying small, young people, recruiting them to cause mayhem across the country." The remark, framing young Nigerians as pliable tools of political sabotage rather than citizens with grievances of their own, drew criticism from commentators who felt it echoed the dismissive tone that has periodically defined how Nigeria's political class speaks about its youth.
The contrast with Senator David Mark, who presided over the Senate for two terms between 2007 and 2015, is instructive. Mark, for all the controversies of his own career, built his relationship with colleagues on a very different rhetorical foundation. At his inauguration as Senate President in 2011, he told the chamber plainly: "I recognize that I am only a first among equals. I will be your humble servant and you my bosses." He returned to that language at the close of the 7th Assembly in 2015, addressing lawmakers as "my bosses" once more. Whatever one makes of Mark's tenure, that particular framing — of the Senate President as servant rather than disciplinarian — stood in sharp contrast to the posture that has come to define Akpabio's years in the chair.
None of this is to say Akpabio has been without defenders. His allies argue that presiding over 109 strong-willed politicians requires firmness, and that a Senate President who cannot enforce order risks a chamber that descends into chaos. Akpabio himself has framed his approach as necessary discipline, not disrespect, and has spoken publicly of welcoming "constructive criticism" and insisting Parliament was "never built to keep the people out." But the cumulative record — the repeated threats to eject sitting senators, the nightclub remark, the suspension of colleagues later overturned by the courts, the public clashes with his own party elders and his own Senate Leader — paints a picture of a presiding officer whose relationship with his fellow lawmakers has been defined as much by confrontation as by consensus. For an institution built on the principle of equals debating among equals, that is not a small thing.
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