By Ambrose Amos
The renewed call for the impeachment of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has brought back a familiar feature of Nigeria’s presidential democracy: a politically potent threat that is considerably easier to make than to execute.
The latest demand followed renewed controversy over Tinubu’s prolonged absence from Nigeria and allegations that he failed to transmit a written declaration to the Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives, as required under Section 145 of the 1999 Constitution.
The Social Democratic Party’s 2027 presidential candidate, Adewole Adebayo, has gone further to call for Tinubu’s immediate impeachment, alleging a constitutional breach.
Some lawmakers under the Save Democracy Group have also called on Senate President Godswill Akpabio and Speaker Tajudeen Abbas to reconvene the National Assembly and consider mandating Vice-President Kashim Shettima to act as President.
But while impeachment is constitutionally possible, the political and numerical realities of the 10th National Assembly make a successful removal of Tinubu a substantially different proposition from simply raising the issue in the media or on the floor of the Senate.
Nigeria’s Constitution does not provide for the Senate alone to impeach a sitting president.
Section 143 requires a process involving both chambers of the National Assembly, and the thresholds become progressively more difficult at each critical stage.
The first step is a written notice alleging gross misconduct, signed by at least one-third of all members of the National Assembly and presented to the President of the Senate. The allegation must contain detailed particulars of the alleged misconduct.
Within 14 days, both the Senate and House of Representatives must decide whether the allegation should be investigated. That decision requires a two-thirds majority in each chamber.
If that hurdle is crossed, the President of the Senate asks the Chief Justice of Nigeria to constitute a seven-member investigative panel.
The panel investigates the allegations and gives the President an opportunity to defend himself.
If the panel finds the allegations established, the matter returns to both chambers. The President can only be removed if each chamber adopts the panel’s report by a two-thirds majority of all its members.
This means that an impeachment process cannot be completed simply because opposition senators are able to mobilise a significant number of colleagues.
The arithmetic is particularly important.
The Senate has 109 members, meaning a two-thirds threshold requires 73 senators. The House has 360 members, requiring 240 representatives.
That is where the current political configuration of the National Assembly becomes critical.
Following the June 2026 bye-elections, the Senate returned to its full complement of 109 members, with the APC holding 88 seats, the ADC nine, PDP five, NDC four, and APGA, Labour Party and Accord one each.
In other words, the ruling party alone controls substantially more than the 37 senators that would be required to block a two-thirds resolution.
The implication is not that APC senators cannot rebel against the President. They can. Nor does it mean that an impeachment attempt is constitutionally impossible.
Rather, it means that those seeking Tinubu’s removal would have to persuade a very large number of lawmakers from the ruling party to vote against the President at two separate two-thirds stages, and ultimately secure the same supermajority in the House.
That is a formidable political undertaking.
As Waziri Adio observed during the 2022 impeachment threat against former President Muhammadu Buhari, once a two-thirds majority is required, the burden shifts heavily to those seeking removal. A president needs only enough legislators to prevent the required supermajority from being achieved.
The history of presidential impeachment threats in Nigeria provides perhaps the clearest indication of why the latest call is unlikely to translate into removal.
In 2002, the House of Representatives issued President Olusegun Obasanjo a two-week ultimatum and threatened impeachment over allegations including constitutional breaches, incompetence and corruption.
The move generated enormous political tension, but the required impeachment notice was never successfully served and the process did not culminate in Obasanjo’s removal.
The United States Department of State’s 2003 human rights report also recorded that the impeachment effort eventually failed.
Obasanjo famously dismissed the attempt as a “joke taken too far”, a phrase that has since become associated with Nigeria’s repeated presidential impeachment threats.
Two decades later, the country witnessed another striking example.
In June 2018, the National Assembly, then led by Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker Yakubu Dogara, warned Buhari that it could invoke its constitutional powers if the administration failed to address worsening insecurity, alleged political harassment and other concerns.
Although the word “impeachment” was not contained in the formal resolution, lawmakers made clear that the threat was understood as an impeachment warning.
Yet Buhari remained in office until the expiration of his second term in May 2023.
The most relevant precedent is the 9th National Assembly, because it demonstrates the enormous gap that can exist between an impeachment threat and an actual constitutional process.
In July 2022, senators across political parties threatened to commence impeachment proceedings against Buhari over the deteriorating security situation.
Led by then Senate Minority Leader Philip Aduda, opposition senators staged a walkout after Senate President Ahmad Lawan declined to entertain their motion.
They subsequently announced a six-week ultimatum, warning that Buhari would face an impeachment notice if the security situation did not improve. The senators even chanted “Buhari must go” while addressing journalists outside the chamber.
But the threatened impeachment never materialised.
The Senate leadership disputed the characterisation of the action as an official impeachment process. Senate spokesperson Ajibola Bashiru said at the time that he was not aware of any impeachment motion having been formally filed.
The episode illustrated one of the central problems with impeachment threats in Nigeria: the difference between political messaging and constitutional action.
A walkout is not an impeachment notice.A press conference is not an impeachment notice.A six-week ultimatum is not an impeachment proceeding.
And even an impeachment notice is only the beginning of a long constitutional process.
The Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre noted in its review of the 2022 episode that Buhari had faced impeachment threats at least four times since assuming office in 2015, yet none resulted in his removal. It also pointed out that the one-third threshold required to initiate proceedings is considerably easier to reach than the two-thirds threshold required to move the process forward and ultimately remove a president.
The immediate controversy surrounding Tinubu is rooted in Section 145 rather than the traditional allegations of corruption or insecurity that characterised previous impeachment threats.
Section 145 provides that when the President proceeds on vacation or is otherwise unable to discharge the functions of his office, he is to transmit a written declaration to the Senate President and Speaker stating that the Vice-President is to perform the functions of President as Acting President.
However, whether Tinubu’s absence constitutes “inability” within the meaning of the Constitution, and whether the relevant constitutional procedure has been complied with, is a matter that can be politically and legally contested.
Tinubu’s camp has not accepted the interpretation advanced by his critics.
Akpabio has said Tinubu remains in charge despite his absence from Nigeria, describing the President as being on working leave and insisting that there is no vacancy in Aso Rock.
Yemi Adaramodu, the Senate spokesman, similarly rejected the demand for an immediate reconvening of the National Assembly, saying there was no reason for such a move and arguing that the legislature should not respond to every political statement made by politicians and civil society groups.
That position is significant because the Senate leadership controls the legislative machinery through which any impeachment process would have to begin.
Nigeria’s impeachment provisions deliberately make presidential removal difficult.
That is not accidental. The President is elected nationally, while the National Assembly is composed of legislators elected from individual constituencies and states. Removing a President therefore requires an unusually broad coalition cutting across political parties and regional interests.
The framers of the constitutional procedure placed several safeguards between an allegation and removal: signatures, notice, separate votes by both chambers, investigation by an independent panel and another two-thirds vote in each chamber.
The experience of Obasanjo and Buhari demonstrates how difficult it is to assemble such a coalition.
The 10th Senate makes the calculation even clearer.
With APC controlling 88 of 109 seats, opposition parties would need an extraordinary level of defection from the ruling party to get anywhere near the 73 votes required for a two-thirds Senate majority.
And even if that were achieved, the House would present another hurdle.
The impeachment effort would therefore have to become more than an opposition campaign.
It would have to become a broad legislative revolt involving significant numbers of lawmakers elected on the platform of the President’s own party. That is a much higher bar.
The repeated failure of impeachment threats does not mean that such threats are politically meaningless.
In 2018 and 2022, the pressure from lawmakers reflected wider concerns about insecurity, governance and the relationship between the executive and legislature.
The 2022 episode, for example, came after attacks including the Abuja-Kaduna train attack and the Kuje correctional facility breach.
The senators’ threat emerged from growing security concerns and frustration with the government’s response.
Similarly, the present controversy has placed Section 145 and presidential accountability back into public discussion.
The legislature can therefore use the controversy to demand explanations, summon relevant officials, debate constitutional compliance and insist on transparency without necessarily proceeding to the extraordinary step of removing the President. That distinction is important.
Impeachment is not simply a stronger version of a Senate resolution. It is a constitutional removal process requiring a supermajority in both chambers.
From Obasanjo in 2002 to Buhari in 2018 and 2022, Nigeria’s democratic history shows that presidential impeachment threats have repeatedly generated headlines without crossing the constitutional finish line.
The 10th National Assembly enters the latest episode with an even more pronounced numerical advantage for the ruling party.
For Tinubu to be impeached, therefore, those calling for his removal would have to convert public and political pressure into a formal constitutional process, secure the required one-third signatures to initiate it, win two-thirds votes in both chambers to investigate, survive a seven-member investigative panel, and then secure another two-thirds vote in both the Senate and House.
The immediate political arithmetic does not point to an easy path.
What the present controversy does demonstrate, however, is the continuing importance of the National Assembly as the institution constitutionally empowered to scrutinise presidential conduct.
Whether lawmakers choose impeachment, investigation, resolution, oversight or another constitutional response is ultimately a question of legislative action rather than political rhetoric.
For now, the history of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic suggests that calling for a president’s impeachment has been considerably easier than assembling the numbers and political coalition required to actually remove one.
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