Whose Accountability? Citizen Assessments of Legislative Oversight in Lagos and Kogi States, Nigeria (2015-2023).

Abstract

Public Accounts Committees and the wider apparatus of legislative oversight are constitutionally well provisioned across Nigeria’s thirty-six states, yet citizens experience accountability very unevenly. Drawing on an original survey of 134 residents of Lagos and Kogi states, complemented by responses from civil-society organisations and triangulated with documentary evidence, this paper asks how ordinary citizens assess the effectiveness of legislative financial oversight and to what they attribute its failures. The findings are sobering and consistent. More than two thirds of citizens (67.9%) rate oversight as ineffective, and on every performance dimension mean ratings fall below the scale midpoint. Citizens report weak transparency, stagnant or declining accountability, and almost no participation in budget processes. Lagos residents rate oversight modestly higher than their Kogi counterparts, but the difference is a non-significant trend rather than a confirmed gap. Most strikingly, citizens locate the source of oversight failure overwhelmingly in political and behavioural factors, namely political interference, lack of political will, and corruption (76.9% combined), rather than in any deficit of formal legal powers (1.5%). Civil-society respondents corroborate this picture, reporting closed oversight processes and an Auditor-General widely seen as lacking independence. We argue that the central obstacle to effective subnational oversight in Nigeria is not the design of institutions but the political will to use them, and that reform should therefore target the incentives, transparency, and public visibility of the oversight process rather than its statutory architecture.