| dc.description.abstract | The level of infrastructural development in Nigeria has not improved significantly since the return of democracy in 1999. Poor infrastructure development has been perpetuated despite the oversight roles of Nigeria’s National Assembly. The importance of the oversight role of the legislature in entrenching good governance is not in dispute, however, the productivity and impact of such an essential role on the people remains questionable. It is against this milieu that this study examined the oversight functions of the legislature in promoting infrastructural development to identify the challenges of oversighting infrastructural development in Nigeria, using the 9th National Assembly (2019-2023) as a case study. The justification for this study is that its empirical findings will provide an excellent background to resolving the non-effectiveness of legislative oversight functions and possible challenges hindering oversight functions on infrastructure development in Nigeria.
The study adopted a qualitative research design analytical method which offers the benefit of allowing the researcher to have a broad opinion and feeling of legislative oversight in the National Assembly. This approach is considered suitable because of its capacity to deliver adequate, timely, and firsthand information and to permit informed decisions on legislative oversight and infrastructural development in Nigeria. A purposive sampling method was used to select the respondents for the study. A total number of 40 respondents were sampled from the National Assembly (20), Ministries (13) and Civil Society organizations (7). Key informant interviews were used to obtain data from the respondents while thematic and content analysis were used to analyse the data. The purposive sampling method was adopted because it allows for the selection of participants who are most relevant to the research question. Alternatively expressed, the method ensures that the data collected is rich and directly pertinent to the study's objectives, leading to more meaningful and focused findings.
For the first objective, the result revealed that although the National Assembly have improved in their legislative oversight activities, it has not been overly effective in promoting core infrastructural development. For objective two, the result showed that corruption, bureaucratic processes, security challenges, inadequate resources, poor working relationship between the executive and legislature and lack of patriotism were key challenges affecting the legislative oversight function of infrastructural development.
In view of the findings, it was recommended that adequate resources be provided for oversight activities to ensure optimal effectiveness and that the poor working relationship observed between the executive and the legislature be improved to avoid unnecessary bureaucratic bottlenecks in their relationship. | en_US |
