When Experience Walks Out Of the Door: What Losing Dozens of APC Lawmakers Means for Nigeria.

Out of APC’s 330 federal lawmakers—242 in the House of Representatives and 88 in the Senate—dozens failed to secure tickets for 2027. Some were beaten in crowded primaries, others were disqualified on procedural grounds, and a few withdrew after negotiations behind closed doors. On the surface this looks like ordinary party renewal. In reality it is a forced turnover of legislative memory at a scale Nigeria has not experienced in a single election cycle. The immediate story is about who won and who lost inside APC. The deeper story is about what happens to lawmaking, oversight, and national development when institutional knowledge walks out of the National Assembly in one sweep.

Legislative work is cumulative. A member who has sat on Appropriations for eight years knows why a line item for a critical project keeps stalling, which ministries misreport performance data, and how to navigate a controversial amendment through committee without killing the bill. That knowledge does not live in a manual. It lives in relationships, in memory of past negotiations, and in the ability to read the room during budget defense. When dozens of such members exit at once, that knowledge does not get transferred. It leaves with them. The result is a legislature that has to relearn its own procedures, reestablish its credibility with ministries, and rediscover pitfalls that were already solved in previous assemblies. For complex reforms in petroleum, taxation, electricity, and electoral law, that learning curve is expensive. National development does not pause while new legislators study the standing orders and figure out how the system actually works.

Institutional continuity suffers in more than one way. Committees on Finance, Works, Defence, Health, and Education rely on continuity to track multi-year projects and hold ministries accountable. When a chairman who understands contractor performance on a flagship rail line is replaced by someone new, oversight weakens. The risk is not merely inefficiency. It is that ministries and agencies exploit the gap. Budgets get padded, abandoned projects get relisted with new names, and the cycle of waste continues because no one in the room remembers that the same contract failed three years ago. Experience also matters in negotiation. Veteran lawmakers know how to trade concessions across bills to get contentious legislation passed. They know which fights are worth having and which will stall the entire legislative agenda. Naivety leads to zero-sum confrontations that end in deadlock. In a system where the executive relies on party discipline and legislative skill to push reforms, that matters more than speeches on the floor.

This does not mean experience is automatically virtuous. Many of the lawmakers who lost tickets had become fixtures without function. Some were serial floor-crossers whose loyalty followed patronage. Others were absentee members whose main legislative contribution was to defend constituency projects that existed only on paper. Removing them creates space for legislators who are less captured by party cabals and more accountable to their constituencies. New members often bring networks and technical knowledge that long-serving legislators lack. A first-term member from the private sector, academia, or civil society may understand digital economy, climate finance, or public health policy in ways that a 12-year veteran does not. On those issues, fresh expertise can compensate for lack of legislative tenure. The problem is that Nigeria’s parties rarely pair fresh talent with structured onboarding. They assume that winning an election equals readiness to legislate, and they leave new members to learn on the job at the country’s expense.

The most acute risk lies in oversight and budget scrutiny. Lawmaking is visible. Oversight is where experience pays off in quiet, unglamorous ways. Knowing which questions will expose inconsistencies in an MDA’s performance report, following up on resolutions that MDAs ignore, and understanding how to use the budget process to enforce accountability all require practice. If the 11th National Assembly is dominated by first-termers without mentorship, oversight will weaken further. That has direct consequences for national development. Infrastructure funds leak, social programs underperform, and the budget becomes a ritual of appropriation rather than a tool for delivery. You can pass the Finance Act in a week. It takes years of consistent, informed oversight to make sure the revenue it generates is actually spent on what was approved.

The implications extend beyond the National Assembly. State assemblies and local governments watch what happens at the center. When federal legislators treat lawmaking as theater and oversight as optional, the standard filters down. Ministries and agencies also adjust their behavior. A ministry that knows it faces a technically sharp committee will prepare better data, reduce padding, and respond faster to queries. A ministry that expects a committee of novices can afford to be evasive. In that sense, the loss of experienced legislators weakens the entire accountability chain from Abuja to the states.

There is also a political economy angle that rarely gets discussed. Experienced lawmakers often serve as stabilizing nodes in their states and zones. They mediate between governors, traditional institutions, and party structures. They channel federal projects to their areas and manage expectations when resources are tight. When they are removed without a plan, those nodes collapse. The result is more friction between federal and state actors, more abandoned projects, and more political volatility at the subnational level. National development depends on that horizontal coordination as much as it depends on federal policy.

None of this means the turnover should not have happened. Parties need renewal. Voters are tired of legislators who treat Abuja as a retirement plan. The problem is the absence of a mechanism to preserve what works while removing what does not. The Electoral Act has closed the defection route, but it has not created a system for knowledge transfer. Parties do not run formal induction programs. Committees do not publish handover notes. Former lawmakers are not formally engaged as advisers. So the cycle repeats: new members arrive, make mistakes, leave, and the next batch starts from zero.

For APC, the turnover is a stress test of whether it sees the National Assembly as a governing institution or as an extension of party patronage. If the party invests in induction, pairs new members with former legislators, runs policy bootcamps, and gives committees the staff capacity to compensate for inexperience, the loss can be mitigated. If it does not, the 11th Assembly will spend its first two years in a learning curve while urgent reforms stall. The executive will either have to lower its ambitions or push through legislation with less scrutiny, both of which carry costs.

For the country, the implication is mixed. The exit of non-performing lawmakers is healthy. The simultaneous exit of competent, experienced ones is a loss. National development suffers when both are treated the same way by the primary process. Experience matters because governance is technical, cumulative, and relational. Naivety is not fatal if it is paired with humility, training, and access to institutional memory. The problem is that Nigerian parties rarely provide any of those things. They replace people but not systems, and then wonder why performance does not improve.

The answer to whether experience will matter is yes, it will, in ways that show up in slower bills, weaker oversight, and more room for executive and bureaucratic discretion. The answer to whether naivety will affect the potential legislators is also yes, unless something changes between now and the inauguration of the 11th Assembly. The editorial question is whether parties and the National Assembly treat onboarding as an afterthought or as a core part of governance. Right now, the evidence points to afterthought. That is how you get good people who achieve very little, and how you turn legislative renewal into a net loss for the country.

If parties refuse to fix this, who should? Should civil society, the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, or even the executive step in to provide non-partisan induction for new lawmakers?

Peter Agi (FCA)
A Public Affairs Commentator
Writes from Ijegu-Ojor
Yala LGA.