By Sam Agogo
Nigeria’s budget cycle has, for years, followed a familiar and dispiriting choreography. An Appropriation Act is signed into law with considerable fanfare, capital allocations are unveiled with all the confidence of firm commitment, and then, month after weary month, the machinery of implementation grinds to a halt. Deadlines slip quietly past. Percentages are rolled over, almost as a matter of routine, into the following year’s budget. Security agencies, tasked with confronting insurgency, banditry and kidnapping in nearly every corner of the federation, report to committee after committee that they have received no capital releases at all. And through it all, the National Assembly — the one arm of government constitutionally empowered, indeed obligated, to interrogate this drift — largely holds its peace. Lawmakers grumble in the corridors and in private conversations about the very frustrations their constituents raise on the campaign trail, yet in the full glare of public scrutiny they close ranks behind their parties, as though loyalty to leadership were a heavier obligation than loyalty to the electorate that put them in office.
It is against this backdrop of quiet institutional fatigue that Senate Chief Whip Tahir Monguno’s recent intervention deserves serious and sustained attention — not as an isolated flash of temper to be filed away and forgotten, but as a rare and consequential public airing of a frustration that runs, largely unspoken, through much of the chamber.
Monguno, who represents Borno North, confronted the Finance Minister directly and unflinchingly over the non-implementation of the 2025 budget. Seventy percent of that year’s capital budget, he observed, had already been rolled over into 2026, accompanied by an assurance that the remaining thirty percent would be implemented by March. March arrived, and passed, without incident, and even that modest fraction went unreleased. So dire was the shortfall that the National Assembly found itself compelled to extend the life of the 2025 Appropriation Act all the way to September, merely to afford the executive further room to implement a budget that ought, by any reasonable reckoning, to have long since run its course. And now, he cautioned, the 2026 budget itself had scarcely begun to move. His question, stripped of diplomatic cushioning, was as simple as it was devastating: if revenue-generating agencies are consistently outperforming their targets, and government maintains that it has borrowed nowhere near the trillions being alleged, then where, precisely, is the money going? If a budget is passed into law but never faithfully implemented, he asked, what then remains of the function of government itself? To fail in implementing an Appropriation Act, he warned pointedly, is to breach the law — and such a breach, in his estimation, rises to the level of an impeachable offence.
It is a fair question, rigorously posed, and one that deserves to be asked far more often, by far more legislators, in far less muted tones. That it required a Senate Chief Whip — a ranking leader of the very party in power — to pose it with such clarity speaks volumes, unfortunately, about the diminished state of legislative courage in Nigeria today.
For here lies the uncomfortable truth beneath the headline: Monguno’s frustration is not a solitary or eccentric grievance. Anyone who has sat in the gallery of the National Assembly, or held a candid conversation with a lawmaker once the cameras have been switched off, understands that his complaint is shared, almost universally, by colleagues across party lines. They witness the same capital votes rolled over year after year. They hear the same recycled excuses about revenue that never quite reaches the projects it was meant to fund. They know, every bit as well as Monguno does, that a security agency informing a committee it has received zero capital allocation is not a bureaucratic footnote to be glossed over — it is a crisis with consequences measured in lives lost and communities left exposed.
And yet, overwhelmingly, they say nothing. Not for want of facts, and certainly not for want of conviction, but because party loyalty has, over time, hardened into something treated as a higher and more urgent obligation than the oath these legislators swore to the people who elected them. Today’s lawmaker is often more anxious about a summons from party leadership than about a constituent demanding to know why a promised road remains unbuilt or a promised clinic remains unequipped. The party whip system, a legitimate and useful instrument of legislative discipline in principle, has in practice calcified into something closer to an instrument of silence — one that mutes precisely the kind of scrutiny the National Assembly was constitutionally designed to provide.
This is not how a functioning legislature is meant to operate. The doctrine of separation of powers does not summon lawmakers to serve as cheerleaders for the executive; it summons them to serve as a check upon it. A senator’s allegiance to party should never be permitted to eclipse his accountability to the electorate, and it must certainly never be permitted to eclipse his obligation to the Constitution he swore, under oath, to uphold and defend. When budget implementation collapses year after year, and when security votes go unreleased even as insecurity metastasizes across the country, the legislature’s silence is not a posture of neutrality. It is, in substance if not in intent, complicity.
Monguno’s willingness to name the problem without euphemism — to reach for the word “impeachable” rather than retreat into softer, more diplomatically palatable language — should not be dismissed as an aberration, still less as a breach of party etiquette. It ought instead to be embraced as the standard to which every legislator, regardless of party affiliation, is held. Other lawmakers, watching insecurity fester in their states and capital projects languish unfinished in their constituencies, owe their people precisely the same candour. Nigerians did not send men and women to the National Assembly to shield ministers from discomfort or to preserve the unity of party caucuses. They sent them there to ask hard questions, relentlessly, and to insist upon honest answers.
Were more lawmakers to speak with the same freedom Monguno exercised that day, budget implementation would very likely improve — not because the executive would suddenly discover a newfound conscience, but because it would know, unmistakably, that it is being watched by men and women prepared to say so aloud, without flinching. Until that culture of candour takes root more broadly, the country will continue to hear the truth only in fragments — voiced by the rare legislator bold enough to risk his party’s displeasure, while countless others who feel precisely the same conviction continue to choose comfort over courage.
*For comments, reflections and further conversation: samuelagogo4one@yahoo.com | +2348055847364*
