.png)
There is a peculiar institution operating within the Federal Republic of Nigeria that has, in recent years, quietly abandoned its constitutional vocation for a gentler and more forgiving line of work. It no longer legislates so much as it convenes. It no longer scrutinises so much as it endorses. And when it is not doing either of those things, it is on recess.
Nigerians have not been funding a National Assembly. They have been financing a charity foundation, one dedicated not to widows, orphans or the indigent, but to the care and feeding of phantom agencies, the adoption of unexplained budget lines and the preservation of abandoned bills in permanent legislative foster care.
The figures are difficult to dismiss as mere political rhetoric. Between June 2023 and March 2026, the National Assembly reportedly spent 581 of its first 1,003 calendar days on recess, compared with 422 days of plenary activity. In 2025 alone, it sat for only 141 days, which is 40 days below the constitutional minimum of 181 sitting days. By the end of March 2026, lawmakers had managed just 17 sitting days for the year.
To be fair, lawmakers perform committee work outside plenary. To be fairer, the public has been denied the attendance records that would allow anyone to verify how much of this invisible work actually occurred. This is therefore not a legislature that is merely absent. It is a legislature that insists its absence is confidential.
The Guest of Honour: A Prince and His Ghost Council
Every charity needs a marquee beneficiary, and the National Assembly has found a particularly deserving one in the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, or PFIPC.
Under the leadership of Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, who reportedly presented himself as the council’s Director-General, the PFIPC acquired the appearance of a federal institution despite, according to the Presidency, never having been established by law, presidential instrument, executive approval or any other lawful act of government.
This was not a roadside organisation operating from a cybercafé. The council was operating from within the Federal Secretariat, obtained administrative recognition and secured a federal waiver permitting it to recruit 300 employees. Most damning of all was that it also found its way into the 2026 Appropriation Act with a provision of approximately ₦1.303 billion, ₦802.98 million for personnel, ₦200 million for overheads and ₦300 million for capital expenditure.
There is an important qualification. The Budget Office and the Office of the Accountant-General maintain that no part of the ₦1.302 billion appropriation was released to PFIPC because the required financial and payment approvals were never completed. But this does not answer the more troubling question: how did an institution that did not legally exist acquire a budget code, a recruitment waiver and a place in an appropriation law examined and passed by the National Assembly?
The scandal is not that ₦1.3 billion was successfully stolen. The scandal is that ₦1.3 billion was successfully appropriated.
The security guard may have stopped the intruder at the final door, but somebody had already issued him a visitor’s badge, introduced him to the staff, and placed his lunch order in the budget.
The House of Representatives subsequently established an ad hoc committee to investigate the matter. That intervention is welcome, although it arrived after the questionable allocation had already travelled through the budget process and entered an Act of the National Assembly. The Senate, meanwhile, declined to begin a separate inquiry and chose to await the outcome of the ICPC investigation ordered by the President.
In other words, the House called the fire service after passing the building plan, while the Senate decided that curiosity was now an executive function.
The Appropriation Bazaar
The PFIPC controversy should not be treated as an isolated clerical accident. It emerged from a budgetary culture in which the National Assembly has increasingly treated appropriation as a national open market: everybody brings a project, somebody finds a ministry under which to place it, and nobody asks too many questions about who ordered the borehole.
BudgIT’s analysis of the 2025 federal budget found that the National Assembly inserted 11,122 projects valued at ₦6.93 trillion. A further ₦3.18 trillion was reportedly added to capital supplementation, bringing the wider capital additions identified by the organisation to approximately ₦9.11 trillion. The insertions included 1,477 street-light projects, 538 boreholes and 2,122 ICT-related projects.
We understand that not every legislative insertion is unlawful or unnecessary. Lawmakers may legitimately identify needs overlooked by the Executive. The problem is the scale, fragmentation, and opacity of the exercise. When thousands of projects appear without clear public justification, transparent selection criteria, or reliable implementation tracking, constituency development becomes difficult to distinguish from political patronage.
Nigeria does not lack projects. It has more projects than it knows what to do with. What it lacks are completed projects, procurement transparency, maintained projects and projects whose contractors can be located after commissioning photographs have been taken.
Budgets That Refuse to Die
Nigeria’s budgets have developed a remarkable form of immortality. They do not expire at the end of a fiscal year. They linger, roll over, and eventually become ancestors.
In April 2026, President Bola Tinubu signed a ₦68.32 trillion budget while simultaneously extending implementation of the 2025 capital budget to 30 June 2026. The 2026 figure was approximately ₦10 trillion higher than the original ₦58.18 trillion executive proposal. Meanwhile, by the end of September 2025, only about 18 per cent of the capital allocation for that year had reportedly been spent.
This means Nigeria formally entered 2026 with two active budgets and substantial unfinished projects carried forward from previous cycles. Critics have described the broader practice as running multiple budgets concurrently. Whatever terminology is preferred, the accountability problem remains the same: when one fiscal year bleeds into another, it becomes increasingly difficult to establish which budget was meant to build which road, protect which vulnerable community, equip which hospital, or fund which school.
The figures continue to grow. Implementation remains on sabbatical.
A budget should be a measurable national plan, not an annual work of speculative fiction. Yet Nigeria’s appropriation process increasingly resembles a publishing industry in which each new edition is longer, more expensive, and less likely to be read by those approving it.
The “Privilege” of Secrecy
When AdvoKC submitted a Freedom of Information request on the 19th of June 2026, seeking attendance, absence, apology and voting-participation records for members of both chambers, the National Assembly did not respond within the statutory seven-day period.
It eventually replied after a notice of non-compliance and the threat of legal proceedings. The response was remarkable: the records were said to constitute “evidence of proceedings” protected by legislative privilege and could only be released with the authorisation of the Senate President, Speaker, or relevant committee chairman.
In what other public institution is the basic question of whether an employee reported for duty treated as privileged information?
Lawmakers are visible enough at airports, weddings, party congresses, constituency receptions, and empowerment-programme ceremonies. It is only when citizens ask for a formal attendance register that the matter suddenly acquires the sensitivity of nuclear launch codes.
Legislative privilege exists to protect free debate and parliamentary independence. It should not be stretched into an invisibility cloak for administrative records. Whether a lawmaker attended work is not a confidential opinion expressed during deliberation. It is a roll call.
A legislature that cannot publicly account for who attended its sittings has no moral basis for summoning ministers, agency heads, and private citizens to explain their own conduct.
The Legislative Agenda: Where Promises Go for Long-Term Care
The Honourable Tajudeen Abbas-led House did not begin without a plan. Its Legislative Agenda contained specific commitments organised into short-, medium-, and long-term timelines. It promised reforms in governance, justice, security, education, healthcare, electoral administration, public participation, and institutional transparency.
Three years later, AdvoKC’s Legislative Agenda Meter found that the House had kept only 13 of 56 tracked promises, compromised four and broken 39—producing a weighted fulfilment score of 26.8 per cent. Its score for Governance and Political Reform was approximately six per cent, while Economic Development and Jobs recorded zero. The Senate performed better, but its 44.11 per cent score still reflected nine kept promises, 12 compromised commitments and 13 broken ones.
This does not mean that nothing has been done. The House reported introducing 2,747 bills and passing 363 within three years. The Senate’s official dashboard recorded 1,033 bills introduced by April 2026, with 106 passed and 424 still in committee.
But bill production is not the same as promise delivery. And the throughput can be misleading. A bill can be introduced, assigned a number, photographed with its sponsor, and then spend the remainder of its natural life “awaiting committee report.” In the National Assembly, legislation does not always die. Sometimes, it is simply placed on administrative life support until the Assembly expires.
Consider local government autonomy. The Legislative Agenda promised to recognise local government as an independent tier with full financial and operational autonomy. HB 2121 was introduced to strengthen local administration and had reached the committee stage. Yet, in the same constitutional-review exercise, HB 1215 proposed removing local government as a constitutionally recognised and federally funded tier altogether.
One bill says local governments should be liberated. The other says they should be returned to state governors with the constitutional equivalent of a receipt. This is not reform. It is Parliament arguing with itself in two separate documents.
The Gender and Equitable Opportunities Bill has had an even longer stay at the legislative orphanage. An earlier version was rejected by the Senate in 2016. Another attempt had its second reading stepped down in 2021. The current version, SB 401, received first reading in March 2024 and remains listed as awaiting second reading. Nigeria has now debated equal opportunity for women long enough for an entire generation of girls to grow up and watch the bill remain the same age.
Other promises of significant public importance remain unfulfilled. The House pledged to enact a dedicated law promoting inclusive education for children with special needs. It promised funding for court digitisation and improved judicial infrastructure. It undertook to domesticate relevant international human-rights treaties, reform the appointment of INEC’s leadership, strengthen air passenger rights, improve public procurement, regulate electronic surveillance and establish systems through which citizens could submit petitions online.
Children with special needs received another promise. Court users received another promise. Air passengers received another promise. Citizens wishing to petition Parliament received another promise. The promises, at least, appear to be receiving excellent care.
Public-procurement reform illustrates the cycle. Earlier amendment bills have remained trapped at preliminary or committee stages, while yet another Public Procurement Act amendment SB 1059, was introduced in July 2026 and was still awaiting second reading. Procurement reform has now become less of a legislative project and more of a recurring television series. Every season begins with a new bill. None reaches the finale.
Electoral Reform and the Network-Failure Republic
Electoral reform provides the clearest example of how the Assembly can take genuine action while still leaving crucial promises compromised.
The Electoral Act 2026 made important improvements. It gave statutory recognition to BVAS and the INEC Result Viewing Portal, required electronic transmission of polling-unit results and created penalties for officials who deliberately frustrate transmission.
Then it inserted an escape hatch.
Where transmission fails because of “communication failure”, the manually completed result becomes the primary source for collation. The Act does not clearly define communication failure, require independent technical verification, or impose a specific timeframe within which transmission must occur.
Nigeria has therefore legislated mandatory electronic transmission, except when the network says no, somebody says the network said no, or nobody can establish whether the network said anything at all.
The Act also removed the previous power allowing courts, in certain candidate-disqualification cases, to declare the lawful runner-up the winner. It instead directs that another election be conducted without the disqualified candidate and party. This preserves the expense, uncertainty, and political tension of rerun elections because apparently the only thing better than one disputed Nigerian election is paying for another one.
The Act is progress, but progress with an emergency exit strategically positioned beside the most important provisions.
Credit Where It Is Due, Because Accuracy Is Not Charity
A serious assessment must acknowledge that the 10th National Assembly has enacted consequential legislation. Some of which are the passing of tax-reform laws, the new minimum-wage framework, student-loan reforms, the Cybercrimes Act amendment, Electoral Act 2026 and recently the passage and harmonisation of the UBEC Act. Important constitutional-review work, including proposals concerning state policing, has also advanced.
The argument is therefore not that every legislator has done nothing or that every law passed is worthless. The argument is that impressive bill counts cannot erase the Assembly’s failure to deliver the specific reforms it promised within the timelines it set for itself.
A restaurant cannot defend 39 missing meals by displaying the number of plates washed.
The Legislative Agenda was presented as a public covenant, not just a brainstorming document. Short-term promises were not suggestions. Medium-term commitments were not motivational quotes. They were measurable undertakings against which citizens were invited to assess performance.
What is the Moral for the Citizens?
The lesson is uncomfortable but necessary. A National Assembly that approves a budget line for a phantom agency, inserts trillions of naira in projects, runs overlapping fiscal frameworks, hides attendance records, and allows major reforms to decay in committee cannot simultaneously demand unquestioning public deference.
Nigerians must stop treating elected representatives as lords and masters graciously dispensing development. They are public employees exercising delegated authority on behalf of citizens. Their salaries, offices, travel, committees, vehicles, and recesses are funded by citizens who are entitled to ask what was delivered in return.
The public demand is not extravagant. Nigerians are not requesting a seminar on parliamentary diplomacy. They want to know whether their representatives came to work, how public funds entered the budget, what happened to bills after first reading, and why promises with published deadlines remain unfinished.
They also deserve a complete explanation of how a “Prince” with allegedly forged documents came close enough to the government to obtain institutional recognition and enter a national budget. The reports that no money was ultimately released are a relief. It is not an acquittal of the system that carried the fiction so far.
To accept phantom appropriations, secret attendance records, overlapping budgets, and perpetual legislative delays without protest is to become an involuntary donor to a remarkably expensive charity.
The National Assembly does not need another retreat, open week, strategic dialogue, or commemorative publication explaining its vision. It needs to publish the attendance records, disclose its budget in detail, complete pending reforms, release committee reports, and account for every promise against the timeline in its own Legislative Agenda.
The 10th Assembly still has time to change the final verdict. But time, unlike the Nigerian budget, cannot be rolled over indefinitely.
It is time to end the vibes, audit the charity, and remind every occupant of the chamber that a legislative seat is a job, not a lifetime achievement award for professional absence.
And where the promised service has not been delivered, Nigerians are entitled to ask the most ordinary question any dissatisfied donor would ask:
Where is our receipt, and how & when do we get a refund?
This op-ed draws on AdvoKC Foundation’s Three-Year Legislative Agenda Meter Assessment of the 10th National Assembly and additional public records and independent research.
