Senate President Obong Godswill Akpabio needs to explain to Nigerians how the national budget transformed into a marketplace for hustlers under his leadership. This isn't an accusation—it's a straightforward demand for clarity from the former Niger Delta minister.
Akpabio should speak plainly, without the fake accents and dismissive remarks, and tell Nigerians what happened to a budget supposedly designed to serve the country's needs. Recent weeks have made it abundantly clear that the 2026 budget scandals are piling up.
In 2016, Abdulmumin Jibrin, then chairman of the House appropriations committee, exposed a massive budget fraud by accusing Speaker Yakubu Dogara, Deputy Speaker Yusuf Lasun, Chief Whip Alhassan Doguwa, and Minority Leader Leo Ogor of padding the budget. According to Jibrin, approximately 2,000 fake projects worth over ₦284 billion were inserted into that year's budget.
A national budget runs to thousands of pages. The 2026 budget spans 2,790 pages—plenty of room for fictitious agencies and countless solar street light projects assigned to government officials and ministries with no connection to street infrastructure to slip through unnoticed.
When Jibrin raised the alarm in 2016, he was suspended and kept away from parliament beyond what the law permitted. Not a single House member defended him, even though the accused legislators themselves admitted benefiting from the stolen funds.
The accused remained comfortably in their positions.
The Buhari administration, celebrated for fighting corruption, said nothing. Its agencies followed suit and stayed silent.
This method of looting became known as budget padding. Lawmakers with power and enough greed simply added whatever they wanted—sometimes billions—and claimed it as official business.
Nobody asked questions.
The only complaints came from those who felt cheated in the distribution of stolen money. Oversight duties morphed into forcing agencies to execute "constituency projects" far from their actual locations.
Take Federal College of Education, Umunze in Anambra State. The institution found itself constructing roads in Surulere, Lagos State—522 kilometres away—while its own internal roads crumbled and the college claimed insufficient funding.
Surulere happened to be the constituency of Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila, now chief of staff to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The construction board brazenly listed Umunze as the "client" for roads built nowhere near campus. Gbajabiamila isn't alone in this practice, which existed long before he became Speaker and continues today.
When the Speaker's office attempted to explain the connection between Umunze and Surulere, the explanation only deepened the mystery. The legislature, they claimed, uses a "technical template for budgeting" in which federal executing agencies are routinely assigned projects in constituencies distant from their operations.
