There is a phrase that has come to define the Nigerian Senate under Godswill Akpabio, and it is not a policy or a piece of legislation. It is an instruction: take a bow and go. A nominee walks into the chamber, is recognised as a former colleague or a friend of the leadership, and is waved through without a single serious question about competence, record or intention. Screening, one of the few powers the Constitution gives the legislature to protect citizens from bad appointments, has been reduced to a photograph and a handshake. It is difficult to think of a clearer symbol of a chamber that has forgotten what it is for.
Confirmation Was Meant to Be a Gate, Not a Corridor
The requirement that ministers, ambassadors, service chiefs, commission chairmen and electoral officials pass through the Senate exists for one reason: so that no president can staff the machinery of state with people accountable only to him. That check assumes senators will read the files, test the claims and reject the unfit. Under Akpabio’s leadership, Nigerians have watched marathon sittings clear long lists of nominees at a pace that makes genuine scrutiny arithmetically impossible. A chamber that can confirm in an afternoon what it should interrogate over weeks has not exercised a power. It has surrendered one.
The Questions That Are Never Asked
Consider what a functioning screening would sound like. What did you do with the budget of the agency you last led? Which of your previous targets did you miss, and why? What are the three things you will be measured against in two years? Are there petitions, audit queries or unresolved allegations attached to your name? Nigerians rarely hear these questions put with any seriousness. What they hear instead are compliments, prayers, appeals to regional solidarity and requests that the nominee remember his home state when contracts are shared. The nation’s most important job interviews have become the nation’s warmest reunions.
Every Failed Appointee Was Confirmed by Somebody
The cost of this is not abstract, and it does not stay inside the chamber. When an agency collapses, when a parastatal cannot account for its spending, when a regulator protects the industry it was created to police, the trail leads back to a confirmation that nobody contested. Akpabio’s Senate has been unusually willing to hand the executive whoever it asks for, and then unusually reluctant to summon those same officials when things go wrong. Nigerians are therefore paying twice: once for the appointment that should have been blocked, and again for the oversight that never arrives because the chamber has no appetite to embarrass its own choices.
A Club, Not a Legislature
The take-a-bow convention rests on an idea that ought to alarm every voter: that having once been a senator, governor or minister is itself proof of fitness for further office. It treats the political class as a pool of interchangeable men who have earned permanent access to public money regardless of what they did with it last time. Under Akpabio, this instinct has hardened into etiquette. Rigorous questioning is treated as rudeness, and a colleague who insists on answers risks being cast as difficult rather than diligent. That is how a legislature becomes a club, and a club cannot check anybody.
The Leadership Sets the Temperature
None of this can be blamed on procedure alone. A Senate President controls the order paper, the pace of proceedings, the committees and the recognition of members who wish to speak. He decides whether a screening runs for two hours or two days, whether a petition against a nominee is read or shelved, and whether a senator with an inconvenient question gets the floor. Akpabio has used that authority to keep the chamber comfortable and the executive satisfied. The tone in the Red Chamber is a choice, and it is his to answer for.
What Nigerians Lose When Nobody Guards the Gate
The ordinary Nigerian never sees a screening session, but lives inside its consequences. The hospital without drugs, the university on strike, the road contract awarded and abandoned, the commission that cannot explain its accounts, the security agency that answers to no one visible. Each of these has a person in charge, and that person was confirmed on the nation’s behalf by senators who were paid to look closely and chose not to. This is the quiet form of institutional decay: not a dramatic coup against the Constitution, but a slow agreement to stop using the powers it grants.
A Standard Worth Demanding in 2027
Nigerians are entitled to a Senate that treats confirmation as a duty owed to citizens rather than a courtesy extended to friends. That means published nominee records, minimum hearing times, mandatory publication of petitions received, and a leadership willing to lose a vote occasionally. Godswill Akpabio’s tenure will be remembered for the opposite: a chamber where the hardest thing to obtain was a hard question. As the country moves towards 2027, voters should ask every aspiring legislator a single thing before anything else. Will you make nominees earn your vote, or will you tell them to take a bow and go?
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
