Odita Sunday 
An Open Letter from a Future Lawmaker to the Current Senate President
To: His Excellency, Senator Godswill Akpabio, CON
President of the Senate, Federal Republic of Nigeria
Your Excellency, I write with the highest regard for your office and with profound disquiet about the condition of the nation you swore to serve.
Nations ascend or disintegrate by the quality of their legislature.
When the United States was brought to its knees by the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, it was the U.S. Congress, under Speaker Carl Albert in the House and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield in the Senate, that legislated the nation back to strength.
*Through deliberate statutes, a Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and fiscal policies that unlocked domestic production, Congress cushioned the embargo and set America on the path to becoming the largest producer of crude oil in the world today*. Yes America is the largest oil producer globally.
That is what purposeful, courageous lawmaking achieves. It is therefore deeply troubling that the Nigerian Senate under your leadership cannot point to a single transformative law that has decisively addressed electricity, insecurity, dilapidated roads, electoral malpractice, healthcare collapse, or the decline of education.
We are a country blessed with enormous oil and gas reserves and an unrivalled reservoir of human capital, yet we have nothing tangible to show because no effective law has ever been anchored to our fiscal regime to transform Nigeria the way deliberate legislation transformed Dubai from desert to destination.
Instead, what will define the 10th Senate is a debt binge in billions of dollars, unprecedented in Nigeria’s history. Loan after loan has been contracted at punishing commercial terms, yet there is nothing to show for it.
No power. No roads. No security. No hope. What compounds this tragedy is the speed of approval.
The legislature is constitutionally bound to interrogate, to scrutinise, to check executive excess. But under your watch, what Nigerians hear is never “the Senate queried the President’s loan request.” What we hear, time and again, is “the Senate has approved.”
This haste suggests the 10th Senate has abandoned its duty of oversight and appears to capitalise on the naivety and exhaustion of a citizenry too burdened by survival to read the fine print of sovereign debt.
Your Excellency, let me be plain. The 10th Senate does not deserve re-election. If anyone contests this position, let that person give Nigerians one reason grounded in law, legacy, or livelihood.
The Nigerian Senate deserves a vibrant, new set of lawmakers with the competence and conscience to turn things around. I urge you to take a deep retrospect on this advice.
History is unforgiving to parliaments that presided over national decline, Senator Akpabio you can do better.
The gavel you hold can still be used for redemption, but the window is closing
Respectfully,
Laurence Izegbu
ADC House of Assembly Aspirant
Aniocha North, Delta State
April 30, 2026
07058327544.
About the Author
