GODSWILL Akpabio chairs the National Assembly. He is also President of the Senate. In 2025, he and members of the Assembly raised their budget by 74 percent, increasing it from N197.932 billion in 2024 to N344.383 billion. In spite of this significant increase, their performance remains underwhelming, according to policy analysts.

Currently, the National Assembly under Mr Akpabio has approved all the loan proposals presented before it by President Bola Tinubu without question. Consequently, as exclusively reported by Economy Post, in just two years, Mr Tinubu government’s loans constituted 43 percent of Nigeria’s total public debt, which stood at N152.398 trillion as of June 2025.

The shocking side of Mr Tinubu’s debts is that they are mostly external, meaning they are expensive to be repaid and will be serviced in dollars. They ballooned to N93 trillion in 2 years based on Postlytics‘ exclusive calculations, which were different from yet-to-be updated figures by the Debt Management Office (DMO).

In 2025 alone, President Tinubu’s administration has borrowed $3.754 billion from the World Bank alone, signifying the government’s rising growing appetite for foreign loans.

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Economists say debt isn’t bad, but when a government or entity focuses more on debt rather than its own earnings, there is a problem. Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr Wale Edun, said on November 17 that while the Nigerian government projected N40.8 trillion revenue for this year, it ended up making only N10.7 trillion, marking a shortfall of N30 trillion. This explains why analysts say the government isn’t generating enough revenue.

Yet, every loan proposal by the Tinubu administration is approved by the National Assembly without looking at the nation’s debt profile under the current administration.

Poor budget implementation

Another area of monumental failure of the Akpabio-led National Assembly is in budgeting. For the first time in years, Nigeria is operating a multi-budgeting system. The nation is yet to fully implement the 2024 budget and has deferred 70 percent of the 2025 capital budget to 2026. Yet, the government, last week, presented the 2026 budget totalling N58.47 trillion to the National Assembly with little protests.

“The crisis emanated from the National Assembly, which is supposed to ensure that this did not happen,” said a financial expert, Mr Sebastian Udugba.

“If they are providing the real checks and balances and not being a rubberstamp legislature, the executive would have stood it up to its responsibility. Now, severa MDAs operated this year without budgets, which is a real shame.”

No investigative output

Perhaps, one of the greatest failures of the Akpabio-led National Assembly is the fruitlessness of its investigations. It constantly invites ministers, heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to ‘explain’ the loss of public funds, yet nobody gets to know the outcome of the matters. It raises empty alarms but fails to perform its constitutional duty of recommending arrests to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) or the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC). 

In October 2023, the House of Representatives invited the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited ( NNPCL) over lack of funds to explore and develop new frontier acreages.

The House of Representatives recently summoned the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Olayemi Cardoso, to appear before its Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to address the alleged non-remittance of over N16 trillion in government revenues. The Senate also recently invited Edun and other ministers over the collapse of $30 million Safe School Initiative. The National Assembly under Mr Akpabio has ‘summoned’ hundreds of heads of government agencies, yet these issues for which they were invited remain unaddressed.

For instance, the Safe School Initiative remains stalled in 30 states, The Punch reported. Also, today, billions of naira have accrued to the Frontier Exploration Fund, yet money is still not being released to develop frontier acreages.

The Auditor-General of the Federation (AGF) has recommended severally that erring heads of MDAs, especially those who supervised corruption, account to the National Assembly how money was used. Yet, the National Assembly has failed to summon the heads of government units or address issues in the report.

For instance, in its 2022 report, the AGF accused the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Police Command of booking 42 AK-47 rifles and pistols as well as 737 live ammunition in 2 years but neither returned nor re-booked them.

The AGF said police personnel under the command booked live ammunition and firearms from the FCT CID between 2021 and 2022, but its failure to return or re-book them made it difficult to verify the existence or otherwise of such arms.

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The AGF recommended that the then Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Mr Usma Alkali Baba, account to the Public Account Committees of the National Assembly why firearms booked by officers were not returned and re-booked in line with the provision of the Nigeria Police Act 2020.

The AGF also recommended that the IGP account to the committees of the National Assembly the whereabouts of the arms and ammunition, including the live bullets, failure of which must attract sanctions in line with Paragraph 3129 of the Financial Regulations (2009).

Yet, the National Assembly is yet to invite the former IGP or the current one over the critical matter.

“There have been hundreds of such cases that have gone univestigated,” said an Abuja-based policy analyst, Mr Yahaya Ahmed. “What about the constant singing of ‘On Your Mandate We Stand’ to please the President who they are supposed to checkmate his excesses? What about the ignonimous approval of the state of emergency in Rivers State?” he querried.

“In the National Assembly, they constantly talk about defections and parties when critical issues like hunger and poverty are staring Nigerians in the face. I don’t know which is worse between this National Assembly led by Akpabio and the earlier one led by Ahmed Lawan.”