The Legislature We Deserve: On Nigeria's National Assembly Budget and Its Accountability Deficit

In a country where a public school teacher earns approximately ₦30,000 a month — often paid late, sometimes not at all — the Nigerian National Assembly received a statutory transfer of ₦344.85 billion in the 2025 Appropriation Act, in addition to an extra ₦170 billion allocation captured under the Service Wide Vote. This covers the running costs of 469 legislators and their support apparatus: the staff, the vehicles, the security details, the overseas trips, the constituency allowances, and the considerable personal emoluments that make a Nigerian lawmaker one of the highest-paid in the world relative to per capita income. Beyond this, BudgIT documented that lawmakers inserted 11,122 additional projects worth ₦6.93 trillion into the 2025 budget — a figure that dwarfs the statutory allocation itself.

Let us sit with that ratio for a moment. Nigeria's GDP per capita is approximately $2,000 (World Bank, 2023). Its legislators earn, in allowances alone, multiples of what the average Nigerian earns in a lifetime. The legislature that is constitutionally mandated to represent the people has, over time, become an institution that is sustained by the people but oriented primarily toward itself.

"A parliament that costs more than it produces — in legislation, in oversight, in service — is not a parliament. It is a welfare scheme for the politically connected."

The Oversight Paradox

The National Assembly's constitutional role is threefold: legislation, representation, and oversight. Of these three, it is in oversight that the legislature's failure is most consequential and most visible. The executive has, in successive administrations, expanded its reach — spending without appropriation, deploying security forces without legislative authorisation, and managing state resources with opacity that would be challenged in any functioning democracy.

Nigeria's National Assembly, with rare exceptions, has watched this happen. It has held few meaningful investigative hearings that resulted in accountability. It has passed few consequential anti-corruption or institutional reform bills from its own initiative. Its relationship with the executive has too often resembled partnership rather than oversight — understandable given party dynamics, but constitutionally indefensible.

What a Legislature Should Cost — and Deliver

The question is not whether a legislature requires adequate funding. It does. Lawmaking, constituency service, and effective oversight require resources. The question is proportionality: whether the cost of the institution bears any reasonable relationship to what it delivers for the citizens who fund it.

By that measure, Nigeria's National Assembly is not delivering. The ratio of legislative output to legislative expenditure — measured not merely in bills passed but in laws that demonstrably improved Nigerian lives — is deeply unfavourable. And until Nigerian citizens begin to demand otherwise — to track legislative performance, to know how their representatives vote, to show up at constituency offices and demand accountability — the legislature will continue to be exactly as expensive and exactly as unproductive as it has always been.

This is what Conscience Letters is for. Not outrage — outrage is easy and cheap. Analysis is harder. And action — informed, sustained, civic action — is what actually changes things.

Conscience Letters No. 003. NITIZEN Editorial, May 2026. Contact: hello@nitizen.ng