Former Senate President Bukola Saraki has again sought the need for the independence of the legislature, describing it as critical to the survival of democracy.
Saraki, who was among the guests in the June 12, 2026, edition of The Platform, said lawmakers must be able to scrutinise proposals from the executive arm of the government.
“So what I learned in those four years in the National Assembly is that a legislature that cannot say no is not a legislature at all. A legislature which simply receives executive proposals, approves them without scrutiny, and goes home has not fulfilled its constitutional mandate,” he said at the public lecture organised by the Covenant Nation.
“It has merely performed a ceremonial function. It’s an echo. A democracy made only of echoes is only one election away from becoming something else entirely.”
The former governor of Kwara State said the “greatest danger to a free people is not a weak government but an unchecked government: authority that answers to no one and cannot be questioned.”
Saraki said the framers of the Nigerian Constitution “deliberately split power into three separate arms of government—dependent on one another, yet meant to be independent.
“They built friction into the system on purpose; it was not a mistake. That friction is not dysfunction; it is the very thing that guarantees your freedom.
“This is a fundamental concept we must understand if we want to strengthen our democracy, because I am sure the majority of us struggle with it. People ask, ‘Why are the executive and the legislature always at each other?’ By constitutional design, they are meant to challenge each other so there can be checks and balances.”
According to him, the legislature serves as a shield for democracy, without which the system would be destroyed.
“On this June 12th, the lesson is plain. We did not lose democracy in 1993 because the people failed; we lost it because the institutions that should have defended the people’s verdict were too weak to do so. The remedy is not less politics; it is stronger institutions, and the legislature stands at the centre of them,” the former Senate President told the gathering.
“Political tension does not vanish when suppressed—it accumulates. A society where grievances cannot find expression through its institutions will see those grievances vent on the streets. The legislature is built to let those voices be heard and resolved before they explode.”
Buttressing the importance of checks in government, Saraki recalled how the National Assembly under his leadership was able to track alleged irregularities in the subsidy regime.
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“I remember in the 7th Senate when I was moving a motion on fuel subsidy regime and how there was corruption,” he began, adding that “in those days what used to happen was we used to import petroleum products, and they would bring in vessels with documents to say ‘Vessel MV’, and those vessels were nowhere in Nigeria, and they would stamp the documents and pay them.”
“But as somebody who had the ability to reach out, I went as far as going to the register, and I could see that the vessel that was supposed to be in Lagos port was somewhere in Colombia,” Saraki, the Senate president between June 9, 2015, and June 11, 2019, said.
“So I told NNPC to see the vessel they paid for and see where it is. This is the capacity of what I mean by legislatures also having the capacity.”
Hafsoh Isiaq is a graduate of Linguistics. An avid writer committed to creative, high-quality research and news reportage. She has considerable experience in writing and reporting across a variety of platforms including print and online.
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