Senator Godswill Akpabio’s political career started with his appointment as a commissioner serving across three key ministries; Petroleum and Natural Resources, Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, and Lands and Housing between 2002 and 2006 in the Obong Attah administration of Akwa-Ibom state. What followed was a fierce political battle to secure the governorship of Akwa Ibom State, serving two terms from 2007 to 2015, after which he defected from the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC). He won a seat in the Senate in the 2015 general elections and served as the Federal Minister of Niger Delta Affairs before resigning in 2022 to contest for the 2023 presidential primaries. He ultimately ascended to the most powerful legislative seat in the land, President of the 10th Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2023.
The Akpabio-led Senate has been defined above all else by its remarkably frictionless relationship with the executive. On the surface, this degree of alignment is expected because both Akpabio and President Tinubu are members of the APC, and party loyalty is an enduring feature of Nigerian politics, but there is a meaningful difference between political alignment and institutional surrender. A senate that shares a party with the president can still ask hard questions, demand accountability, and slow down decisions that deserve deeper scrutiny. What has emerged instead is a chamber that appears more eager to accommodate the executive than to interrogate or check it.
On March 31, 2026, President Bola Tinubu sent two letters to the Senate, requesting approval to borrow $6 billion from foreign lenders. This is a staggering sum that represents one of the largest single loan requests in Nigeria’s recent history, with repayment obligations that will bind Nigeria for a long time. Yet, the entire process, from receipt of the letters, through committee review, floor debate, and the final vote, was completed in less than four hours. A loan of this scale that deserves weeks of informed scrutiny, independent fiscal analysis, public consultation, and transparent debate, was rubber-stamped before the day was over.
Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution, modelled consciously after the American system of government, created a National Assembly with sweeping powers specifically intended to prevent executive overreach. The creators of the Constitution understood that no person or institution should hold unchecked power, and that liberty depends on one arm of government being willing to frustrate the excesses of another.
Constitutionally, the Senate is far more than a debating society. It controls the spending of federal funds, has the authority to confirm or reject key executive appointments, approve treaties negotiated by the executive, and retains the ultimate power to impeach the president. Sections 88 and 89 of the 1999 Constitution give the legislature sweeping oversight powers, empowering senators to investigate any government ministry, department, or agency, and to compel the production of documents and witnesses. These are not ceremonial powers, they are constitutional tools given to elected senators to use on behalf of the people who voted for them.
Nigeria switched from a parliamentary to a presidential system in 1979 precisely to create a more robust separation of powers and a sharper system of checks and balances. The Senate was meant to be a co-equal branch, not a subservient one. The reality under Senator Akpabio is different.
Less than a month later, on April 23, 2026, President Tinubu sent another letter to the senate. This time, he requested approval for a $516,333,070 loan from Deutsche Bank to fund sections of the Sokoto-Badagry Super Highway, a 1,000-kilometre road linking Nigeria’s North-West to its South-West. The loan would carry an interest rate tied to the SOFR benchmark plus 5.3% annually, and would run for nine years, including a grace period of up to three years.
Simply put, Nigeria is borrowing $516 million from Deutsche Bank to build the first 120km stretch of the highway. The loan comes with a partial guarantee from an Islamic insurance body, but still, the interest rate means that Nigeria is borrowing at roughly 9.7–9.85% per year. In addition to repaying the loan, Nigeria must also spend over ₦265 billion of its own money on land and compensation costs for the project. Repayments don’t start immediately, there is a 3-year pause for the loan, but when it is time to pay, it will land on a government already struggling to pay its existing debts.
Nigeria is already spending more money on debt servicing than it actually earns. In the first seven months of 2025, debt repayments and staff salaries together swallowed 105% of revenue. For every dollar Nigeria sent abroad in 2025, 72 Cents went straight to foreign creditors. In 2026, the government has set aside ₦15.52 trillion just for debt repayments, more than four times what it is spending on education and health combined. Debt repayments are expected to consume between 50% and 60% of all revenue this year. The highway might be worthwhile in the long run, but Nigeria is building it on a credit it is already struggling to pay off.
In his letter, President Tinubu did not ask the Senate to scrutinise the arrangement, assess the fiscal risks, or debate the merits of adding more debt on Nigeria’s already strained finances. Instead, he urged lawmakers to offer “expeditious consideration and approval.” In response, Senate President Akpabio promptly referred it to the Senate Committee on Local and Foreign Debts and directed it to report back within one week.
This Senate now acts as a mere processing centre for presidential borrowing requests rather than a deliberative body. The letters arrive, Senator Akpabio reads them aloud, committees are given days or hours to consider what reputable financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank spend months analysing, then approval comes, almost always without meaningful pushback. A legislature reveals its true priorities not just in what it approves for the executive, but in the quality of the laws it produces on its own initiative. And here, the 10th Senate’s record is instructive, not for what it has achieved, but for what it has chosen to focus on.
In May 2024, a proposal to reinstate Nigeria’s old national anthem first surfaced in a closed-door Senate session. Many senators privately opposed and called for wider consultation. But within hours, the bill, an executive proposal sponsored by the Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, had passed its first and second readings. When the Attorney-General of the Federation, Lateef Fagbemi, advised further consultation during a rushed public hearing, the Senate passed the bill for a third reading the very next day. President Tinubu signed it into law on May 29, 2024. After which Nigeria got itself a ‘new-old’ anthem while more urgent matters were brushed aside.
Then there is the Electoral Act Amendment Bill of 2026, arguably the most consequential piece of legislation the 10th Senate has touched so far, given its direct implications for the 2027 general elections. The bill sought to update Nigeria’s electoral framework, and the central question was whether to mandate real-time electronic transmission of polling unit results to INEC’s Result Viewing Portal. Electronic transmission had been a rallying cry for Nigerians who remembered how the promise of technology in the 2023 elections had been deployed inconsistently, creating space for manipulation.
The Senate’s initial response, on February 3, 2026, was to vote down the mandatory electronic transmission clause. Senators retained INEC’s discretionary powers to determine how results are transmitted, a decision that critics described as deliberately preserving loopholes for electoral manipulation ahead of 2027. The decision sparked nationwide protests, with civil society groups and opposition parties descended on the National Assembly to demand accountability. Only under this sustained public pressure did the Senate convene a special session on February 10, 2026, to reverse course, but the reversal was partial. The final law includes electronic transmission but allows for a manual fallback when technology fails, a loophole that electoral experts warn could be exploited at collation centres.
Also very telling was the Criminal Code Amendment Bill of 2025, which sought to increase penalties for supplying instruments or drugs for abortion from three years to ten years imprisonment without the option of a fine. In Nigeria where approximately 1.25 million unsafe abortions occur annually and contribute up to 15 per cent of maternal deaths. Health experts warned the Senate that stricter penalties would drive more women to dangerous backstreet procedures. The bill was eventually stepped down after confusion erupted on the floor when senators couldn’t even agree on what constituted an “unlawful abortion,” revealing legislative unpreparedness that would be comical if the stakes were not so serious.
Those who insist that Nigerian democracy cannot produce a Senate that truly checks presidential power need to be reminded of the past years. Between 2015 and 2019, the 8th Senate, led by Bukola Saraki, not without its faults, represented something the current Senate emphatically is not: a legislature willing to be an adversary to the executive when the national interest demanded it.
Saraki defied the APC leadership to become Senate President through a cross-party alliance, immediately signalling that his Senate would not be managed from Aso Rock. He refused to confirm Ibrahim Magu as EFCC Chairman, twice, forcing the Buhari administration to work with an acting head of the anti-corruption agency for years. His Senate passed the Not Too Young to Run bill, which lowered the age barrier for political candidacy. It processed the Petroleum Industry Governance Bill and passed multiple anti-corruption measures. Saraki also opened Senate plenary and committee proceedings to the public through live television and social media, achieving a daily YouTube viewership of 20,000 at a time when legislative transparency was rare.
Most crucially, the 8th Senate demonstrated that the Nigerian legislature could say no to the executive. It held hearings, invited ministers, and held them accountable. It created genuine friction, the kind of friction that is the cornerstone of functional democracy.
As Senate President, Senator Senator Akpabio has shown a particular style of nonchalance in conduct, abuse of power, and excessive compliance with the executive. At a joint session of the National Assembly in June 2025, he urged senators to ignore critics who call him a rubber-stamp senate. “We should ignore the critics who tag us rubber stamp, they don’t know why we are here,” he said.
At another point, he said, “Some people believe we were voted into office as lawmakers to wear boxing gloves against the executive. That is not why we are here. We will rubber-stamp any executive bill that will positively impact the economic and social well-being of Nigerians and if that decision to cooperate with the executive in the overall interest of our people has made us a rubber-stamp Senate, so be it.”
Akpabio’s conduct towards his colleagues like Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan lays bare another dimension of his leadership; the use of institutional power to silence dissent. After Akpoti-Uduaghan publicly accused Akpabio of sexual harassment, he presided over a process that resulted in her suspension from the Senate for six months, a punishment widely condemned as retaliatory. Bauchi Central’s Senator Abdul Ningi also faced disciplinary action after publicly questioning alleged budget padding.
Under Akpabio, the senate feels less like a deliberative body and more like an administrative annex of the Presidency, processing paperwork with professional efficiency.
With the 2027 general elections approaching, the decisions made by the 10th Senate in this legislative session will shape the conditions under which those elections are conducted and the economic environment in which Nigerians will cast their votes. The electoral act controversies, the debt burden, the quality of oversight, all of it matters for 2027.
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