On Monday, November 2, 2026, BusinessDay published my article, “The case for a Nigerian midterm election.” I argued that Nigerians should be able to change the composition of the Senate and the House of Representatives halfway through a president’s term. On Tuesday, American voters showed precisely what that power amounts to. Donald Trump will remain in the White House, but the electorate has entrusted control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate to the Democrats.

In Nigeria, a citizen who has lost confidence in his senator or representative must ordinarily wait until the presidency itself is again at stake. Why should he have to wait that long?

I shared my article with two of the three senators representing my home state of Abia, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, who was my classmate at Government College Umuahia, and Senator Austin Akobundu, who was my junior at the same college. I requested that they table the issue at the National Assembly. Senator Abaribe replied with his usual courtesy. He indicated that the proposal might have come too late for the present constitutional review but that it could be raised in the next session. I appreciated the candour of his response. I also took from it a practical challenge. If we want the next National Assembly to consider this reform, those seeking election to it should be asked now, while they still need our votes, whether they would support it.

The scale of the Republican defeat deserves attention. The Associated Press reported that Democrats captured at least seven Republican-held Senate seats, including Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, and flipped more than two dozen House districts. Some of those districts had backed Trump by double digits just two years earlier. There is no need to call the defeat unprecedented to appreciate its severity. Voters who had knowingly put Trump in office proved quite willing to take congressional power away from his party. They distinguished between the mandate they gave in 2024 and the performance they had witnessed by 2026.

In most analysts’ reading, the result was a repudiation of Trump’s exercise of power and of the assumption, shared by some of his wealthiest allies, that sufficient money could preserve a congressional majority. Campaign filings examined by The Washington Post showed that Elon Musk alone put about $446 million of his own money into the midterm cycle, most of it aimed at keeping Congress in Republican hands. Such wealth can buy advertising, employ canvassers and secure a hearing for a candidate denied to most citizens. What it could not secure in Texas or Kansas was the voter’s obedience. That distinction ought to interest every Nigerian politician whose first calculation is which godfather can finance his return to office.

Americans themselves offered several reasons for their verdict. The AP Voter Poll found that the economy and the state of democracy were leading concerns, with the cost of living and government corruption weighing heavily on voters. A family struggling with prices had its own reason to reconsider a president who had promised relief. Another voter might have been moved by the treatment of immigrants or by unease about the proximity of immense private wealth to public office. The ballot allowed these citizens to arrive at the same judgement by different routes. It would do them an injustice to assign them all a single motive.

Yet, the constitutional and moral questions deserve examination on their own merits. Consider what Trump did on returning to office on January 20, 2025. He commuted the sentences of named individuals convicted in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol, pardoned the remaining convicted defendants covered by his proclamation and directed the attorney general to seek dismissal of pending cases. The pardon power belongs to the president. My objection is to the judgement with which he exercised it. What assurance does a police officer defending Congress take from the knowledge that a future president may pardon people convicted for their conduct in an attack on that very institution? And what obligation did Republican legislators owe the officers who had defended them? These were fair questions for voters to carry into a congressional election.

Consider also the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In March 2025, the United States sent him to prison in El Salvador despite an existing order protecting him from removal to that country. The administration acknowledged an administrative error. The US Supreme Court upheld the requirement that the government facilitate his release from Salvadoran custody and ensure that his case received the treatment it would have received had he not been improperly removed. To the official who signed the paperwork, an administrative error may be a line in a report. To the man locked up abroad, it is the loss of his liberty. A legislature capable of calling the responsible officials to account is a safeguard whose worth that family would have little difficulty understanding.

The danger of racial profiling became particularly clear in Los Angeles. Litigation over immigration stops raised the question of whether officers could rely on a combination of apparent ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, the work a person appeared to do and where he was standing. In September 2025, the Supreme Court temporarily lifted a lower-court restriction while the litigation proceeded. The justices divided sharply. The concern expressed in dissent is readily understood from Lagos. A citizen waiting for work at a car wash can share an accent, a complexion and an occupation with thousands of other people. Which of those facts tells an officer whether that particular citizen has broken the law?

Political speech also has consequences beyond the campaign platform. During the 2024 presidential debate, Trump repeated an unfounded claim about Haitian immigrants eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. Local officials said there was no credible basis for it. Schools subsequently had to be evacuated or closed amid anonymous bomb threats. Children going to school in an Ohio town bore part of the cost of a story repeated to a national audience. I recall that episode because Nigerians, living in a federation of many ethnicities and faiths, know how quickly a reckless allegation against any ethnic or religious group can travel and lead to dire consequences.

Can this election help restore America’s dignity and the respect that it did once command abroad? I believe it can. What earns my respect is the sight of citizens in states that had supported the president exercising their freedom to rebuke him and doing so while he remains powerful enough to hear it. The incoming Democratic majorities will have obligations of their own. If they investigate abuses fairly, insist on evidence and attend to the living costs that helped bring them to power, they can restore some of the confidence America has lost. Their conduct towards political opponents and vulnerable people will say more about American dignity than any victory speech.

What could a Nigerian midterm election change? Nigeria borrowed substantially from the American presidential system in 1979 and retained its central features in the 1999 Constitution, as amended. We embraced a separately elected president, two legislative chambers and a division of powers. We made different choices about when the electorate could intervene. Americans elect their entire House every two years and roughly one-third of their Senate at a time. Nigeria’s two federal chambers ordinarily run together for four years. We were entitled to adapt the American model to our circumstances. Nearly half a century after the original borrowing, we are equally entitled to reconsider whether our electoral calendar serves the Nigerian citizen.

My starting proposal remains the one I made on Monday. Move elections for the House of Representatives to the midpoint of the presidential term and retain four-year terms for members. Leave the Senate on the presidential cycle initially. A prospective amendment could specify one transitional two-year House term, disclosed before anyone stands for election, after which the regular four-year cycle would resume. No sitting member should receive an extension to accommodate the change. Nigerians would then elect one federal chamber every two years, and both chambers would face the electorate on their own timetable. If experience later favours staggering Senate seats as well, that deserves a separate public debate.

What would this mean in practice? Take a federal road for which money has appeared in successive budgets while the same stretch remains impassable every rainy season. At a constituency meeting, a representative should be able to tell residents how much the National Assembly appropriated, how much the ministry released, whether the contractor was paid and what explanation the relevant committee obtained for the delay. He does not award the contract or supervise the work. He does, however, have a vote on the next appropriation and colleagues with whom he can press for an investigation. A separate House election would give residents an occasion to judge what he did with those powers, without a presidential contest consuming the entire conversation.

The same arrangement would protect a conscientious legislator. A representative who challenges a questionable loan or insists that a minister answer an auditor’s finding may embarrass his own party. Today, the party leadership can present that independence to the electorate as disloyalty during a presidential campaign. A midterm gives the member a better opportunity to come home, produce the documents and explain his vote. Constituents may conclude that the man who asked the awkward question represented them rather well. Accountability includes the power to retain such a person.

I would like every constituency to have a public performance scorecard before polling day. It should record attendance, significant votes, committee work, questions raised on expenditure and what followed when a ministry promised corrective action. It should also record when the member met constituents and how his office responded to their petitions. Counting bills alone would produce a poor assessment. A legislator who uncovers why a completed primary healthcare centre has no staff may have done more for his community than one who introduces a dozen bills that go nowhere. Journalists, professional associations and citizens’ groups could use the same public record to question both the incumbent and those seeking to replace him.

A second nationwide polling day would cost money. It would require trained officials, secure polling units and timely funding for the Independent National Electoral Commission. Turnout could disappoint if citizens expect another expensive exercise followed by silence from the winner. The National Assembly should therefore require INEC to publish a costed transition plan and hold hearings at which Nigerians can examine it. As someone who has managed public finances, I would want to see that estimate. I would also want an honest accounting of what the country pays when a legislature approves expenditure year after year without discovering why the public received so little for it.

Why independent candidacy belongs in the same debate

There is a weakness in my midterm proposal if it stands alone. We could give Nigerians a separate day to judge their representative and still leave a handful of party leaders with the effective power to decide who may replace him. Section 65 of the Constitution ties eligibility for the National Assembly to party membership and sponsorship. Comparable requirements apply to other major elective offices. Independent candidacy has already featured in Nigeria’s constitutional review proposals. The task is to give citizens a workable route onto the ballot at federal, state and local levels.

Think of a retired headteacher who has spent thirty years in a constituency, knows its villages and can call a public meeting that residents attend voluntarily. If the people who know his record want him to stand for the House, why should a party executive have the final word on whether the rest of the constituency may consider him? He should be able to demonstrate local support through verified signatures, present his programme, disclose who finances him and submit himself to the same scrutiny as a party nominee. Whether he wins should be his neighbours’ decision.

The design matters. One Nigerian draft proposed requiring an independent National Assembly candidate to collect signatures from at least ten per cent of registered voters, spread across at least two-thirds of the local government areas in the constituency or district. In a hypothetical constituency of 200,000 registered voters, that would mean securing 20,000 verified signatures merely to appear on the ballot. Before adopting such a threshold, legislators should ask who could afford to organise that exercise. A reasonable signature requirement, affordable filing fees, transparent verification and a quick right of appeal would allow election officials to establish genuine support while giving a community-backed candidate a fair chance. Independents should face the same campaign finance disclosure requirements as party candidates. A wealthy patron is quite capable of sponsoring someone who calls himself independent.

Political parties themselves could benefit. A party that knows a respected local aspirant can stand independently has a reason to conduct credible primaries and explain its choice of nominee. A sitting member who knows that his strongest challenger can reach the ballot has a reason to keep his constituency office open between elections. Even where an independent never wins, the possibility of a credible challenge could improve the quality of the choices parties offer.

I therefore return to Senator Abaribe’s observation about timing. Under section 9, an ordinary constitutional alteration of this kind requires the support of at least two-thirds of all members in each chamber of the National Assembly and approval by at least 24 of the 36 state Houses of Assembly. The work can begin in Abia and in every other state. Let candidates for the next National Assembly say where they stand. Let state legislators hear from their constituents before an amendment arrives from Abuja. And let the next constitutional review publish how each member voted, so Nigerians can see who was willing to trust them with a wider choice.

Some legislators who vote for these reforms may eventually lose their seats because of them. I ask them to put Nigeria first and vote for them all the same. In 2006, Nigerian senators, including members of the governing party, helped defeat the constitutional amendment package that would have opened the way to a third presidential term for President Olusegun Obasanjo. We remember that Senate with respect because, at a decisive moment, enough of its members were willing to disappoint powerful people. The present generation of legislators has an opportunity to earn comparable respect by widening the rights of the people who sent them to Abuja.

On November 3, 2026, Americans used a power their Constitution had already placed in their hands. The question before our National Assembly is whether it will place a comparable power in ours. The Nigerian who has waited through two rainy seasons for an explanation about his road should be able to call his representative to account while the answer still matters. And if a fellow citizen is prepared to stand against that representative, with the demonstrable support of the community, both names ought to be on the ballot.

Sonny Iroche is the founder and CEO of GenAI Learning Concepts Ltd and an AI strategist with more than four decades of experience in finance and infrastructure. He completed the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School Postgraduate Programme in Artificial Intelligence for Business and advocates responsible human oversight of AI. Prior to his postgraduate education on AI, he was a Senior Academic Visitor at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford (2022)