How the Senate Abandoned Its Watchdog Role at the Worst Possible Time
Nigeria is going through one of the most difficult economic and security periods in its modern history. Citizens are suffering from historically high inflation, persistent insecurity, collapsing public services, and a governance environment characterized by opacity and unaccountability. In exactly these circumstances, a functioning legislature with genuine oversight capacity could make an enormous difference by exposing waste, checking executive excess, and ensuring that public funds are used effectively. The Akpabio Senate has instead been almost entirely absent from this crucial role.
Senate oversight committees, which should be conducting regular investigations of government agencies and holding ministers and officials to account for their performance, have been conspicuous by their inactivity on the most important governance questions of the moment. Where investigations have been initiated, they have either been quietly dropped, concluded with findings that do not reflect the weight of the evidence, or used selectively against political opponents rather than systematically against governance failure wherever it occurs.
The CBN Oversight Failure
The Central Bank of Nigeria has been at the center of several major controversies during the early Tinubu administration, including questions about the management of foreign exchange policy and the circumstances of the sudden change in CBN leadership inherited from the Buhari era. These are exactly the kinds of high-stakes governance situations that should trigger aggressive Senate oversight to ensure that Nigeria monetary policy is being conducted in the national interest.
The Senate Finance Committee and the Senate itself have not provided the level of scrutiny that the CBN management situation demanded. Critical questions about how monetary policy decisions were made, what their distributional consequences were, and who benefited from the foreign exchange volatility of the transition period have not been adequately pursued by the Senate. This failure of oversight is not a technicality. It represents a failure to protect the financial interests of every Nigerian whose savings, income, and economic prospects were affected by these policy choices.
NNPCL and the Oil Sector: No Accountability
Oil revenue remains the dominant source of public finance in Nigeria, and the management of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited has direct implications for the availability of public funds for all government programs. NNPCL transparency and accountability to the legislature is therefore not a minor governance issue but a fundamental fiscal accountability question.
Under Akpabio Senate Presidency, NNPCL has not faced the kind of rigorous, sustained Senate oversight that would be expected of a body managing the bulk of Nigeria most critical revenue stream. Questions about production figures, marketing arrangements, remittances to the federation account, and subsidiary operations have not been pursued with the aggressiveness that the scale of public interest demands. The oil sector accountability failure is among the costliest oversight failures of the Akpabio Senate.
The Education and Health Sector Crises
While the Senate has been occupied with its internal controversies and political accommodations, Nigeria education and health sectors have continued their long decline. Public universities remain chronically underfunded. Public hospitals lack basic equipment and medicines. The human capital crisis represented by millions of out-of-school children and inadequate healthcare for the poor has deepened. None of these crises has received the sustained Senate attention it deserves.
A Senate that was genuinely committed to the welfare of Nigerians would have education and health sector oversight at the top of its agenda, using committee hearings, budget scrutiny, and legislative pressure to demand improvements in the quality of public services. The Akpabio Senate has treated these crises as background noise rather than as urgent governance failures demanding legislative response. The people who bear the cost of this indifference are the most vulnerable Nigerians, and they deserve better from their elected representatives.
