by Mohammed Bello Doka
30 June, 2026.
There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a nation when its lawmakers are caught breaking the very laws they were elected to make. It is not the silence of shock — Nigerians stopped being shocked long ago. It is the silence of recognition, the quiet exhale of a people watching a familiar script play out once more, certain of how it ends because they have seen this film before.
On June 7, 2026, a Federal High Court in Lagos delivered a judgment that should have shaken the foundations of Nigeria's legislature. Justice Yellim Bogoro declared unlawful the National Assembly's expenditure of ₦110 billion — ₦40 billion on 465 vehicles and ₦70 billion in support allowances for newly elected lawmakers — ruling that the spending breached the Public Procurement Act, the Code of Conduct for Public Officers, and the constitutional oath every lawmaker swore. "The beneficiaries of the expenditure are the very officials approving it," the judge held, in words that should be carved above the entrance of the National Assembly complex. "This constitutes a case of self-dealing and conflict of interest."
The institution Nigeria built to make laws was found guilty of breaking them. The institution meant to appropriate the nation's resources responsibly was found guilty of looting them. And in response, the National Assembly's leadership has signalled it will appeal — not refund.
To understand why this matters beyond the naira figures, one must return to first principles. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BC, warned that "the rule of law is preferable to that of any individual," precisely because individuals, however brilliant, inevitably govern themselves before they govern others. Nigeria's National Assembly has proven Aristotle's anxiety prophetic — handing itself ₦110 billion while pretending to legislate for 220 million citizens, the majority of whom live in conditions the lawmakers themselves would find unbearable for a single week.
Consider the obscenity of the comparison. While the legislature spent ₦110 billion enriching its own members, the Federal Government spent roughly ₦75 billion on arms and ammunition between 2023 and 2025 — funding meant to confront Boko Haram, ISWAP, and the bandits terrorising the Northwest. Nigeria's lawmakers, in other words, valued their own comfort above the weapons meant to protect the nation from those trying to destroy it. Cicero defined the very essence of a republic as "res populi" — the people's affair, a thing belonging to the people, not to those who govern it. Nigeria's National Assembly appears to have quietly rewritten that definition: the State as the lawmakers' affair.
This is not an isolated lapse. It is a pattern stretching back through the life of the current Assembly. In 2024, Senator Abdul Ningi alleged that ₦3 trillion had been inserted into the federal budget for projects without locations — what he called the highest budget padding in Nigerian history. The Senate's response was not investigation but retaliation: Ningi was suspended for three months. Meanwhile, revelations on the Senate floor confirmed that ranking senators received ₦500 million each in constituency funds, while junior members received a fraction of that sum — a hierarchy of plunder dressed in the language of development.
Even the legislative process itself has reportedly been monetised. A sitting member of the House of Representatives, Ibrahim Usman Auyo, publicly stated that lawmakers must pay between ₦1 million and ₦3 million simply to have a motion or bill read on the floor. A National Assembly director, Ifeoma Ofili, has gone further, describing how legislators routinely accept bribes from the very agencies they are meant to scrutinise during oversight visits — accepting flights, accommodation, and cash in exchange for sanitised reports. Montesquieu warned in The Spirit of the Laws that "constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it" — and that liberty survives only where power checks power. In Nigeria, the body meant to check the executive has instead become indistinguishable from it, a parastatal of the presidency rather than its constitutional rival.
This should alarm every Nigerian, not merely as a matter of fiscal propriety but as a question of national survival. The legislature is not incidental to democracy — it is its defining organ. No military regime convenes an independent parliament. No monarchy tolerates a body that can override the throne. When the Founding Fathers of the United States built their republic, they enshrined the legislature first, in Article I, before they ever wrote of presidents or courts. That same architecture spread across Latin America, postwar Japan and Germany, and post-colonial Africa, because the world recognised a singular truth: a nation without an independent, functioning legislature is not a democracy — whatever else it calls itself.
History offers no comfort to nations that ignore this. The philosopher George Santayana warned that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," yet Nigeria's lawmakers — among the most credentialed political class on the continent, advised by technocrats, briefed by the World Bank and IMF, fluent in the language of governance — appear to know history intimately and have chosen to defy its warnings anyway. The French aristocracy believed the people would endure indefinitely. The Tsarist elite believed the same. Across the Arab world in 2011, ruling classes believed their populations had no breaking point. Each was proven catastrophically wrong, and in every case, what followed the collapse of public patience was not the liberty the people sought, but new and often crueler forms of domination — Napoleon after the French Revolution, Stalin after the Tsar, theocracy after the Shah, military rule and civil war after the Arab Spring.
Nigeria today carries every precondition for that same tragic arc: a population enduring historic poverty, a currency in freefall, insurgency in the Northeast, banditry in the Northwest, separatist agitation in the Southeast, and a military with an established history of intervention. Each of these is a dry branch. The National Assembly's conduct is the spark. Plato, writing in the Republic, traced how democracies decay precisely through this kind of excess — a ruling class consumed by appetite, indifferent to the resentment building beneath it, until the very inequality it tolerates becomes the seed of its own undoing. When Nigerians look at their National Assembly, they do not see governance by the wise; they see plunder by the comfortable, indifferent to the consequences of their indifference.
To be clear, this is not a call for lawlessness or insurrection — Nigeria's courts, however slow, have shown they can still deliver justice, as Justice Bogoro's judgment proves. It is a call for the National Assembly to recognise what its own history, and the world's, has made unmistakably plain. The lawmakers can refund the ₦110 billion rather than appeal the ruling. They can end the practice of monetised motions and bribery-laden oversight. They can subject themselves, finally, to the same Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Allocation Commission rules that govern every other public office holder. The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project has already demanded as much, and Justice Bogoro's judgment gives that demand the full weight of law.
Nigeria's National Assembly stands at a crossroads few of its members seem willing to acknowledge. It can choose the slow, unglamorous work of reform — or it can continue gambling on the comfortable assumption that history's verdicts apply to other nations, other elites, other times. But history, as every fallen aristocracy eventually discovered, does not grant exemptions. It only grants warnings — and Nigeria's National Assembly has now received one of the clearest the courts can issue.
The question is no longer whether the burden of history is real. The ₦110 billion ruling has settled that. The only question left is whether Nigeria's lawmakers will carry that burden with the seriousness it demands — or whether, like so many before them, they will discover its true weight only when it is far too late to set it down.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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