Under Akpabio’s Watch, Nigeria’s Budget almost a Bazaar

By Ikeddy ISIGUZO

HIS Excellency Distinguished Senator Obong Dr. Godswill Obot Akpabio, Senate President, two-tenure Governor of Akwa Ibom State, former Minister of Niger Delta, supervising the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDCC, former PDP Senate Minority Leader, who is no longer of interest to EFCC since he joined APC, should explain to Nigerians how the national budget became a bizarre bazaar in a blizzard of hustlers, under his keen watch.

This is not an allegation. It is a call for Akpabio, to in a clear voice, stripped of fake accents, devoid of derisive side remarks, to tell us how we thought we had a budget for the needs of Nigeria.

In the last few weeks, it is clearer that the scandals in the 2026 budget are competing for brazen awards.

Honourable Abdulmumin Jibrin, Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, exposed a major budget scandal in 2016 by accusing Speaker Yakubu Dogara, Deputy Speaker Yusuf Lasun, Chief Whip Alhassan Doguwa, and Minority Leader Leo Ogor of padding the 2016 budget. He claimed about 2,000 unauthorised and fictitious projects worth over ₦284 billion were smuggled into the budget.

The budget runs into thousands of page. The 2026 budget is in 2,790 pages, enough spaces for fake agencies and those endless solar street lights farmed out to government officials and agencies that have no relationship with street lights of any kind, to be inserted.

In 2016 Honourable Jibrin shouted until he was suspended with a lengthy absence beyond the law. Not one member of the House of Representatives spoke up in his defence though the accused prefaced the allegations with the admission that he was a beneficiary of the loot. He was suspended while the fat cats who he openly named stayed on their plum seats.

The award-winning anti-corruption Buhari administration said nothing. Its agencies followed the prompt.

Looting in this manner was called budget padding. If you have powers and adequate greed, you added whatever you wanted, often running into billions, and pulled it out as trappings of office. No questions.

The most we would hear are whimpers from those who were dealt with unfairly in the sharing of the loot.

Part of oversight functions became agencies being forced to execute “constituency projects” for legislature in parts far cast from their locations. Have we forgotten that Federal College of Education, Umunze, Anambra State, was constructing roads in Surulere, Lagos State, 522 kilometres away? This was at a time the school considered its budget inadequate and its internal road were in a state – with no budget to fix them.

For fuller disclosure and perspective, Surulere was the constituency of the Honourable Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, now the Chief of Staff to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The construction board shamelessly announced, the project, with College of Education, Umunze, as the “client”.

Gbaja, as he is still fondly called, is not alone in this practice which persists and preceded his arrival at the headship of the House of Representatives.

The explanation from the Speaker’s Office deepened the mystery about the relationship between Umunze and Surulere.

“It is, therefore, crucial to inform the public that the Speaker did not divert or swap projects from the South East to South West, but that the legislature has a technical template for budgeting in which executing agencies of Federal Government, most time, are allotted jobs outside of their locations,” the statement clarified.

How does the College of Education, Umunze move from the “client” of the road project that was awarded to JRB Construction Limited, an Abuja-based company, to being the “executing agency” of its own project? Gbaja muddled up the explanation, if ever there was one.

The public only learnt “that the legislature has a technical template for budgeting in which executing agencies of Federal Government” were allocated projects outside their locations.

College of Education, Umunze did not bid for the project. It had no known competence in road construction. While the construction board stated that it was paying for the contract, it was also downgraded to an executing agency of a contract it supposedly awarded.

By the time the Auditor-General of the Federation audits the accounts of ministries and agencies fingers frequently point at the National Assembly as a promoter of opaque accounting practices.

The Auditor-General’s report forwarded to the National Assembly in 2025 exposed that in 2022, the Corporate Affairs Commission had N118.75 million undocumented spending, which CAC said it spent on Nigerian lawmakers on their frequent visits for oversight functions.

Will the Public Accounts Committees of the National Assembly look into these matters?Let us note that 2022 was also the year of College of Education, Umunze constructing roads in Surulere from the school’s annual budget.

It is in the midst of the abuse of budgets and budgeting processes – the building and renovating of palaces for traditional rulers, churches and mosques getting funding – that Akpabio made a most tepid statement that hinted at his timid determination to punish a contractor who he alleged embarrassed the National Assembly and Nigeria. Both can be merged to read Akpabio.

According to Akpabio, he was embarrassed while addressing the House of Representatives when he discovered that the microphones were not working well. He warned the contractor and said he had issued earlier warnings about shoddy maintenance jobs.

Why was Akpabio bringing his troubles with microphones to the attention of the public? What did he say that we needed microphones to hear?

Of all the issues buffeting Nigerians from all sides, he chose to intervene over malfunctioning microphones. It would be recorded for him among his many achievements.

The national budget is being frittered away. Funds, mostly borrowed, are being shared to individual interests that are in conflict with national interests. Akpabio is silent in a great example of absent leadership.

Akpabio will not do anything. Akpabio cannot do anything. His grovelling even in public before the President leaves little to wonder about what happens in private.

Turning up at the National Assembly proudly donnng the Tinubu cap, marked the beginning of his submission of the National Assembly to Tinubu. When at the launching of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, renamed Tinubu Coastal Highway only last week, Akpabio broke into the “On your mandate we shall stand” song, stopping mid stanza on discovering that his croaky voice was the only one nauseating the public.

With or without microphone, Akpabio should address Nigerians on his silent role in the dispersal of our national resources through the imprimatur of the National Assembly which he controls. Could this be what standing on Tinubu’s mandate means?

Finally…
.FOR over three years Governor Hope Uzodinma has overseen the South-East like a viceroy accountable to Tinubu. He spoke for South-East or decided not to speak at all. The summary of his speeches – the South-East is lucky to have Tinubu as President and in gratitude should vote him for another tortuous tenure. The wider belief is that Tinubu has the South-East’s five Governors in his pocket. Alex Otti says Uzodinma cannot speak for other Governors and that they did not endorse Tinubu. But when you listen to Otti speak about Tinubu, it is more than an endorsement. Otti possibly wants to endorse Tinubu directly not through a proxy.

NIGERIA’S football is of low capacity, riddled with administrative incapacity, technical incompetence, and corruption is a given. It cannot survive without a major surgery to kick life into it. Any investment in our football today is a waste unless the shackles on our football are broken. First move would be dismantling the NFF which a Federal High Court declared illegal in 2012: the judgement subsists 14 years on. The planned election should be on hold until the obstacles to inclusiveness, accountability, governance are rested. Let us organise our football, that should be a priority over who attends the next FIFA Congress or who lugs the next meaningless titles. More next week.

MRS Oluremi Tinubu has just donated N2 billion to be invested in reviving the production of Akwete fabrics in Abia State. Nice one, though I keep wondering about the source of the money she donates.

WE should be grateful to whoever or whatever got Senator David Nweze Umahi quiet in the past week. Could it be this? The Incorporated Trustees of the Southern Kaduna Peoples’ United Association, SOKAPU, has instituted a suit against Umahi before the Federal High Court in Kaduna against the Minister of Works, David Umahi, over the death of Mary Habila on June 27 at the minister’s residence. SOKAPU is seeking an order compelling the conduct of an autopsy on the deceased to establish the cause of death and is also claiming N20 billion in damages against Umahi over the alleged loss of life arising from what it described as a breach of duty of care while the deceased was under his custody. Umahi was 63 yesterday and the President hailed him as “one of my outstanding, hardworking ministers, with passion, dedication to duty, and deep sense of patriotism”.

ISIGUZO is a major commentator on minor issues