NATIONAL ASSEMBLY DIRECTOR EXPOSES DIRTY DEALS LEGISLATORS, PERMANENT SECRETARIES DO TO THE DETRIMENT OF WORKERS, HOW BUDGETS ARE COLLAPSED, STAFF DENIED ALLOWANCES, TRAINING AND MONEY SHARED BY TOP SHOTS, WATCH VIDEO

A top bureaucrat at the National Assembly, Mrs Ifeoma Ofili, has opened a can of worms in the National Assembly as she exposed some of the dirty deals being carried out by federal lawmakers in connivance with permanent secretaries who are the statutory heads of the major units of the Assembly.

Ofili, who spoke at a Retreat for legislative staff, organised by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS), for directors and Committee clerks on June 27, 2025, in Abuja, revealed that the political leadership of the National Assembly now collapse budgetary provisions for the bureaucracy into theirs and share it amongst themselves, leaving no funds to operate and run the administration.

According to her directors are now beggars. Only the Permanent secretaries and the legislators have access to funds. And they ‘eat’ what belong to other workers in addition to their own.

She specifically said that funds budgeted for staff welfare that included; training allowances, healthcare, and sports are now collapsed into a curious and ambiguous budget lines after passage and diverted by lawmakers for their personal use.

Ofili, in a video that has gone viral, further revealed some damning allegations of widespread corruption among federal lawmakers, saying that they collect bribes in the name of oversights, doctor legislative reports, deny staff their legitimate entitlements among others.

Mrs. Ifeoma Ofili, who is a director with the National Assembly serving in the House of Representatives and former Clerk of the House Committee on Local Content, pointedly said that lawmakers regularly demand and collect bribes from Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in the guise of so-called oversight responsibility, a practice she noted seriously undermined legislative integrity.

She particularly accused the lawmakers of manipulating reports of public hearings by hiring consultants to write falsified reports, bypassing committee clerks who are legally and procedurally mandated to handle such reports.

In her words; “Talking about oversight. How do you account for the fact that the flight ticket to go and oversight was paid by the agency? What are you coming to write? You go there, they tell you what to write, they give you money, they accommodate you, they give you flight and the members will come and fight over the money that they were given.

“They will not give anything to the clerk. They will not give the committee assistants that they took along. Now, you are compelled to write a report of what you did not see, what did not happen, and you have to lie. Me as a Catholic, I will just go for confession first,” she stressed.

Ofili also said that during a public hearing last year, she was informed by the committee that a consultant had been hired to write the report and upon inquiry, she discovered the consultant did not even attend the public hearing.

She further said; “Secondly, financing a public hearing. We did a public hearing last year and then the committee called me to tell me that a consultant was employed to write a report. And then I asked the consultant, were you at the public hearing? He said ‘no.’ So, what do you want to write? I, Ifeoma should give you the materials to write the report? I said no, it’s not going to happen. I will not work with you. I put my feet down and I told him I’m not going to work with him.

“And I sat down, because they are looking at us as if we do not have capacity. I’m just two steps out of National Assembly for retirement. So, right now, my mother says she’s not dancing so that people will give her money. It is so that they will see me. So, I will say what I want to say. I sat down and I did a proper report of that public hearing and I took it to the chairman.

“I said, this is the report, and they were looking at me like, you mean it. I said, yes. ‘Oh no, you have to change that. I said no, this is what happened.’ If you want to change it, you can now go ahead and change it, but the original report is in my system. I don’t use secretaries. I type my report myself. So, if they want to change it, they should go ahead and change it, I am waiting,” she insisted.

The concerned director, also questioned the sincerity of purpose of the lawmakers’ public posturing, particularly during high-profile investigations into government agencies, saying that while legislators often appear firm on camera when addressing financial misconduct in MDAs, many of the probes are usually compromised behind closed doors.

According to her; “Then we are talking about punishing MDAs. They will come on TV and they will say, ‘this erring MDA did this.’ All the atrocities that are being committed in the National Assembly, who punishes them?” she asked.

Ofili also said; “We don’t follow the budget process the way it is. They will budget money for… for instance, staff budget, money for training, money for clinics, money for sports, money for books, they collapse it.

“It is in the National Assembly we are still hearing about “collapse.’ Now, allowances that are budgeted for National Assembly staff are collapsed. So, we as citizens, because we are still citizens, first, before we became National Assembly staff and then you have no power to even go and hold a press conference because we have sworn to oath of silence. So, I can’t even tell the world how I feel.

“Allowances that are constitutional, even, put it in the constitution this time, statutory allocation to the National Assembly staff, they collapsed for themselves. How do they want the National Assembly staff to function?”

The director gave a grim picture of the plight of members of staff of the National Assembly, particularly that have retired, whom she noted are frequently abandoned and left without pay for years after leaving service, stressing that some of the retired staff are made to wait for one to two years before receiving their retirement benefits.

In the words of Ofili; “Many of the retired staff appear abandoned and become like destitute, with some of them calling their former colleagues to beg for money to buy fuel.
It is not uncommon to see them standing at the entrance of the National Assembly, unable to afford the cost of fueling their cars.

“So, apart from what the constitution says, who is looking at what the lawmakers are collapsing and chopping? They chop their own and chop our own,” she enthused.