LASU Professor proposes “non-renewable” seven-year term for elected public officials

A Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at Lagos State University, Adewunmi Falode, has called for a constitutional amendment to introduce a single, non-renewable seven-year term for all elected public officials.

Falode made the proposal on Tuesday while delivering the university’s 115th inaugural lecture, titled “Bespoke Solutions: Reimagining, Reifying and Realigning the Wheels of the Nigerian State.”

He argued that the current two-term, four-year structure is “wasteful” and fosters an “unstable, combustible and misaligned” political system. According to Falode, this cycle allows for only about five months of undistracted governance before officials become consumed by post-election litigation and campaigning for the next polls.

“With a seven-year single tenure, political office holders would have at least four years of stable governance, while the remaining three years could accommodate campaigns and the resolution of election petitions,” he stated, citing similar models in Mexico and the Philippines.

The scholar was highly critical of the cost of Nigerian democracy, describing it as “elitist, exclusionary and divisive.” He highlighted the escalating budgets for elections—from N1.5bn in 1999 to N242.2bn in 2022—noting that these figures do not include the massive costs of post-election litigation.

“The shocking thing is that after such humongous sums have been expended, with countless lives lost and businesses destroyed, it still takes the intervention of the judiciary to realign the wheel of democracy,” Falode said.

He concluded that the present arrangement is fundamentally flawed, leaving leaders with only two years to fend off court petitions, a few months for effective governance, and the remainder of their term focused on re-election campaigns.