The National Assembly exists for one reason above all others: to hold the purse on behalf of Nigerians and to demand answers about how public money is spent. Under Godswill Akpabio’s Senate Presidency, that institution has arguably done the opposite — it has become one of the least transparent bodies in the federation, spending enormous sums with minimal public explanation while presiding over a budget process that ordinary citizens, and often lawmakers themselves, cannot meaningfully follow. For a chamber whose core purpose is oversight, that is not a minor failing. It is a betrayal of function.
A Budget Line That Explains Nothing
The National Assembly’s own allocation is one of the largest single-institution line items in Nigeria’s federal budget, and it has grown substantially during Akpabio’s tenure. Yet the breakdown offered to the public remains extraordinarily thin. Nigerians are told what the legislature costs. They are not told, in any detail a citizen could audit, what the money buys. Every other tier of government is lectured about fiscal transparency by the very chamber that declines to publish a granular account of its own spending. That contradiction sits at the centre of Akpabio’s leadership and has never been credibly answered.
The Insertions Nobody Will Own
Nigeria’s appropriation cycle has developed a notorious feature: projects that appear in the final budget without a clear trail back to any ministry’s plan or any identifiable sponsor. Boreholes in places that already have water. Empowerment programmes with no measurable output. Contracts awarded in constituencies far from the agencies meant to implement them. Under Akpabio’s watch, public concern about these insertions has grown louder rather than quieter, and the Senate’s response has been to defend the practice as constituency development rather than to open the books. When a leader treats a legitimate accountability question as an insult, the question has usually landed.
Rushing Bills Through Is Not Efficiency
Supporters point to the speed with which the chamber passes budgets and confirms nominees as evidence of a functioning legislature. It is evidence of the opposite. A budget of tens of trillions of naira deserves weeks of forensic examination, not a compressed schedule and a chorus of ayes. When appropriation documents move through committee and plenary at a pace that makes genuine scrutiny impossible, the Senate is not being efficient — it is being decorative. Speed in a legislature is only a virtue when the alternative is obstruction, not when the alternative is actually reading what you are voting for.
Oversight Committees That Do Not Oversee
Senate committees hold the power to summon agencies, examine accounts and force corrections. Under this leadership they have too often functioned as ceremonial venues — budget defence sessions that defend nothing, hearings announced with fanfare that produce no published report, investigations that generate headlines and then evaporate without a single consequence. Nigerians have watched agency heads appear before committees, absorb an hour of theatre, and return to their offices entirely unchanged. Oversight that never ends in a finding is not oversight. It is performance, and the audience has stopped believing it.
The Cost of a Legislature That Will Not Say No
The consequences reach far beyond the chamber. Borrowing requests that should have triggered hard questions about repayment terms and project viability have sailed through. Spending priorities that visibly diverge from the crises Nigerians actually face — insecurity, collapsing purchasing power, failing schools — have drawn little sustained resistance from the people constitutionally empowered to resist them. Every unexamined loan is a claim on the earnings of Nigerians who are not yet born. A Senate President’s most important job is to make sure someone asks the awkward question before that claim is signed. That has not happened.
Opacity Is a Choice, Not a Constraint
Nothing in Nigeria’s Constitution prevents the National Assembly from publishing a full, itemised account of its spending tomorrow. No law bars it from making committee reports public, from disclosing the sponsor of every budget insertion, or from livestreaming its budget defence sessions in full. Other legislatures across Africa and beyond do all of this routinely. The reason it does not happen in Abuja is not legal difficulty or administrative burden. It is a decision, renewed every session, and the person with the most authority to reverse that decision has instead presided comfortably over it.
What Nigerians Should Demand Next
The measure of a Senate President is not how smoothly the chamber runs or how warmly he is received at the Villa. It is whether the institution he leads leaves Nigerians better informed about their own money. By that standard, Godswill Akpabio’s record is a poor one, and the damage is cumulative — each session of unexamined spending makes the next one easier to wave through. Nigerians heading toward 2027 should be asking every legislative candidate a single, unavoidable question: will you publish the budget line by line, and will you name who put each item there? Anything less leaves the darkness exactly where it is.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
