senate

Okay, the Nigerian Senate are starting to join tech gang. First they used their electronic voting system yesterday, and today, they streamed their plenary session

live on Facebook for the first time.

The video showed part of the Senate’s deliberations on the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) for 2017-2019. “Part of,” because it was just a test-run, so it was a pretty short video (about 12 minutes, actually). The full video was uploaded to the Senate’s official YouTube page, where they’ve been uploading their sessions for almost a year now.

To be honest, it wasn’t a smooth broadcast (there were times when the video had no audio), but since it’s a test-run, I’m willing to give them a second chance. I mean, it was kinda funny hearing the Chief Whip call the session to order at the beginning. It reminded me of primary school students and a class captain.

All that aside, I think it’s great that the Senate is employing methods that promote transparency. I’m totally here for it. The curious thing, though, is that the video was streamed on Senate President Bukola Saraki’s  Facebook account, instead of the official Facebook account of the Nigerian Senate. It’s probably because Senator Saraki has more followers, and they needed the traffic, but things should be done the correct way if they are to be done at all.

Anyway, here’s hoping the next video stream will be smoother.

Take a look the video that went up:

Tola Agunbiade Author

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