The Lagos State House of Assembly has stirred public debate after approving ₦6.2 billion in its 2025 budget for the purchase of 40 residential properties in Lagos or Abuja, effectively granting each legislator a house worth about ₦155 million.
According to the Assembly’s second-quarter budget performance report, nearly ₦1 billion — representing 16 percent of the allocation — had already been spent by June 2025. With 40 members in the chamber, the move is being widely interpreted as a “farewell package” to lawmakers, despite growing scrutiny of political entitlements in Nigeria.
This is not the first time such a provision has appeared in the Assembly’s budget. In 2024, lawmakers increased the housing allocation from ₦1.22 billion to ₦6.2 billion, although only ₦126 million was eventually spent. In 2023, over ₦1.1 billion out of a ₦1.22 billion allocation was disbursed, though it remains unclear whether members of the ninth Assembly, which concluded its tenure that year, were the beneficiaries.
Legal experts have raised concerns over the constitutionality of the move. Section 124(5) of the 1999 Constitution empowers state assemblies to legislate pensions or gratuities only for governors and their deputies, without extending the same to legislators. Critics argue that the budgetary provision amounts to creating new entitlements outside constitutional limits.
The issue echoes similar controversies in other states. In 2019, former Bayelsa Governor Seriake Dickson vetoed a “life pension” bill for lawmakers, warning that assemblies could regulate pension rates but not introduce new categories of beneficiaries. More recently, both Abia and Benue States scrapped pension laws that had offered lavish perks to former governors.
Lagos itself has a history of disputes over political benefits. In 2021, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu promised to repeal the Public Office Holder (Payment of Pension) Law, which guaranteed lifetime benefits for former governors and deputies. However, the Assembly opted to merely slash the entitlements by half instead of abolishing them altogether.
Observers say the latest housing allocation could deepen public resentment at a time when many Lagos residents face economic hardship, rising living costs, and housing shortages. Civil society groups are already calling for transparency in how the funds are disbursed and questioning whether legislators should be entitled to such provisions in the first place.
