By Kachi Okezie, Esq
In every functional constitutional democracy, the architecture of governance rests upon a single, non-negotiable pillar: the Separation of Powers. As Baron de Montesquieu famously observed, when legislative and executive powers are united in the same authority, liberty ceases to exist. The primary duty of the legislature is to enact laws, represent the public, and hold the executive accountable through the solemn power of public appropriation. The mandate of the executive, conversely, is to administer the state, oversee public procurement and execute development projects.
Yet, in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, a dangerous constitutional mutation has taken root under the guise of equitable local development: the Zonal Intervention Project, popularly known as the “Constituency Project” scheme. Under this framework, federal lawmakers: senators and members of the House of Representatives, are allocated dedicated pools of taxpayers’ money annually to deliver direct, localised projects to their constituents. What was presented to the public as a well-meaning mechanism to guarantee a “federal presence” in neglected rural communities has morphed into an institutional Frankenstein monster. By conflating legislative allocation with executive project execution, Nigeria has completely bastardised a standard democratic tool, creating an annual, institutionalised vehicle for budget padding, procurement fraud and systemic corruption.
To understand how Nigeria arrived at this crisis, one must trace the scheme’s lineage back to the American model of pork-barrel politics and legislative earmarks. In the United States and other Western democracies, pork-barrel spending emerged as a mechanism for lawmakers to direct federal funds toward specific local projects, such as highways, bridges, military installations, or research centers, in order to bring tangible benefits home and secure political capital for re-election.
Historically, while Western pork-barrel politics has faced valid criticism for fiscal waste, it operates within strict constitutional guardrails. American lawmakers advocate for earmarks through public congressional committee debates, but once funds are appropriated, executive agencies independently handle the bidding, procurement, and execution. The legislator never touches the contract.
The origin of Nigeria’s variant dates back to the dawn of the Fourth Republic in 1999. In the early years of the civil administration, lawmakers in the National Assembly expressed deep frustration over what they perceived as executive marginalisation. They argued that the federal budget, crafted primarily by civil servants and ministers in Abuja, consistently overlooked remote rural communities. To bridge this development gap and give lawmakers a tangible political offering for their home districts, the Olusegun Obasanjo administration introduced the Zonal Intervention Project framework in 2000. However, what began as a compromise to ensure geographical equity quickly mutated.
Lacking institutional safeguards, transparent public bidding processes, and strict separation of powers, the Nigerian system collapsed the critical barrier between legislative budgeting and executive procurement.
The fundamental original sin of Nigeria’s constituency project system lies in this total distortion of constitutional logic. Lawmakers cannot simultaneously act as the authors of the budget, the custodians of public procurement and the supreme judges of project quality. When a legislator (overtly or otherwise) selects a contractor, dictates where a borehole is sunk, or oversees the distribution of empowerment goods, they cross an inviolable constitutional boundary.
The direct offspring of this operational overreach is the practice of budget padding. During the annual budget defence process, the legislature’s power to review the executive’s draft budget is routinely weaponised. Rather than evaluating national economic priorities, lawmakers unilaterally insert thousands of uncosted, unstudied and uncoordinated line items into the budget draft, often totaling hundreds of billions of Naira. Because these items are injected often without input from the relevant Ministries, Departments, and Agencies, they break the back of coherent public financial management.
Specialised research institutes and environmental agencies suddenly find their capital budgets bloated with line items for streetlights, transformers, or motorised tricycles simply because lawmakers domiciled their proxy projects in those specific agencies to evade regulatory scrutiny.
This practice sabotages long-term national development. Federal resources are fragmented into thousands of micro-allocations—tiny, ineffective sums scattered across 360 federal constituencies and 109 senatorial districts. Major, transformative national infrastructure projects are left perpetually underfunded, while public funds are squandered on non-viable, piecemeal interventions.
The rot deepens significantly when project execution begins. Although legal frameworks formally mandate that executive agencies oversee tenders, the reality on the ground is starkly different. Executing agencies are regularly pressured or coerced by legislative oversight committees to award constituency contracts to preferred contractors, often corporate entities owned by or fronting for the lawmakers themselves. This dynamic has given rise to a culture of abandoned infrastructure and kickbacks.
The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission has repeatedly documented billions of Naira disbursed for constituency projects that were either abandoned immediately after initial mobilisation fees were paid or were complete ghost projects that never commenced.
To make matters worse, lawmakers have increasingly shifted their budget insertions away from tangible physical infrastructure such as schools, roads, and primary healthcare centers, toward opaque empowerment schemes. Hundreds of millions of dollars are swallowed annually by non-auditable activities, including short capacity-building workshops, informal grants, or the distribution of sewing machines and grinding equipment. Because these soft projects leave no lasting physical footprint, they provide the perfect legal cover for pure financial extraction.
Furthermore, by stepping directly into project execution, lawmakers render parliamentary oversight utterly meaningless. How can a National Assembly committee objectively investigate corrupt practices or delayed contract execution in a ministry when the contractor in question is a front company for the committee chairman? When the watchdog becomes financially invested in the project, accountability dies.
The argument most frequently mounted in defence of constituency projects, that without them, rural communities would be completely ignored by a centralised executive, is a false choice. It excuses the systemic failures of executive agencies by encouraging legislators to act as mini-governors, bypassing the statutory institutions built to drive national development. If a community lacks clean water or primary healthcare, the answer is not to hand a lawmaker a private procurement allocation. The solution is to strengthen local government administration, reform federal executive procurement, and demand accountability from the Ministries of Water Resources and Health.
To restore constitutional purity and fiscal sanity to its governance architecture, Nigeria must take decisive reformatory action. First, the 1999 Constitution must be amended to explicitly bar the National Assembly and State Houses of Assembly from inserting net-new operational or procurement line items into the executive budget draft. Legislative power over the purse must be strictly limited to adjusting allocations, cutting waste, or rejecting proposals; never initiating private public-works portfolios.
Second, the federal government must formally dismantle the Zonal Intervention Project framework by statutory prohibition. All capital expenditure must originate from national sectoral strategies developed by executive ministries, subject to rigorous cost-benefit analyses, project best use case evaluation and public tender processes.
Finally, the Public Procurement Act must be amended to strictly criminalise any direct or indirect interference by a legislator in contractor selection, tender evaluation, or contract execution within executive agencies, classifying such acts as major economic crimes.
A legislator’s true contribution to their constituents lies in rigorous representation, transformative lawmaking and uncompromising oversight of executive spending; not in acting as a distributor of contracts and handouts. Until Nigeria abolishes the constituency project model and forces the legislature back into its proper constitutional orbit, the national budget will remain less a blueprint for national development and growth and more an annual, institutionalised heist.
-Kachi Okezie, Esq is a legal practitioner and chartered mediator.
