Quick vocabulary check before we go further: “bicameral” just means “two chambers.” “Unicameral” means one. Nigeria’s National Assembly is bicameral, Senate plus House of Representatives. Every State House of Assembly, by contrast, is unicameral, just one chamber, no upper/lower split.
Why the difference? At the federal level, Nigeria is a union of 36 states plus Abuja, each wanting its interests protected regardless of size. The Senate solves this by giving every state the same three seats, no matter its population. The House of Representatives balances it out by allocating seats based on population, so bigger states get proportionally more say. Together, the two chambers make sure neither “equal by state” nor “equal by population” completely dominates the other.
There’s a second reason two chambers exist beyond fairness: friction, on purpose. A bill generally needs to pass both chambers, in similar form, before becoming law. That means every proposed law gets debated twice, by two different groups of people, elected on two different bases. It’s slower, deliberately so. A bad idea has to survive two rounds of scrutiny, not one.
States don’t replicate this because a State House of Assembly is already one elected body representing one government layer with one legislature. There’s no equivalent “state vs population” tension to balance internally the way there is at the federal level across 36 different states, so one chamber does the job.
Is bicameral government “better”? Not automatically, it’s slower, sometimes frustratingly so. But the tradeoff is real: harder for one group to rush something through unchecked. Worth knowing next time you hear “the Senate passed it, now it goes to the House” and wonder why that’s even necessary.
Next up: Who Can Become a Lawmaker? the actual rules for who’s allowed to run for any of these seats.