Rivers State House of Assembly — Government Digital Transformation
I led the design and build of an AI-powered civic engagement platform for the Rivers State House of Assembly — a project that re-engineered how a Nigerian state legislature engages citizens, tracks bills, and represents committee work. Covered by Vanguard, THISDAY and StartupInsights in December 2025.
My role: Lead architect & CEO of delivery firm
The brief
The Rivers State House of Assembly needed a digital platform that did more than a static brochure website. Citizens had no real way to find their representatives, track active bills, or follow committee work. Press accreditation was paper-based. Internal staff still routed questions through phone calls and WhatsApp.
I was brought in — with Gsoft, the firm I lead — to design and ship a platform that would set a new bar for what a Nigerian state legislature’s web presence could be.
What we shipped
A comprehensive civic-engagement platform with:
- Member directory — full profiles for every honourable member, constituencies, committee memberships, attendance records, direct contact channels
- Legislative tracking — every bill, motion and resolution with status, sponsor, full document history
- Committee structures — standing and ad-hoc committees, scope, members, current proceedings
- AI-powered legislative search — retrieval-augmented natural-language search that lets a citizen ask, “What bills has my representative sponsored on education?” and get an accurate, cited answer pulled from the legislative corpus
- Accessibility-first design — WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, keyboard-first navigation, sub-2-second loads on 3G
- Press & media centre — structured accreditation, press releases, archive
How I led it
I drew the architecture on the first day. Server-rendered Laravel with PHP 8.2 for the bulk of the platform — boring, stable, easy to operate. Anthropic Claude as the LLM behind the search, with a retrieval system that indexes every legislative document and answers only from what it finds. Cloudflare in front for caching and WAF.
I led architecture, code review, AI evaluation discipline, and the client engagement directly through to launch. Twelve weeks. Six-person team. No major incidents post-launch.
What it became
The launch was covered in December 2025 by Vanguard, THISDAY and StartupInsights — each describing the deployment as a model for government digital transformation in Nigeria. Read the press coverage.
This is the project I point to when someone asks what serious software in Nigeria looks like in 2026.
Technology
Laravel · PHP 8.2 · MySQL · Anthropic Claude · Cloudflare · WCAG 2.1 AA