As the Tajudeen Abbas–led House of Representatives took its place in 2023, it promised to fast-track the passage of the Whistleblower Protection Bill within the same year.
Agenda 10 under Section 4.2 of its legislative plan made this clear:
“Expedite passage of the Whistleblower Protection Bill to protect witnesses in security-related cases to encourage more people to come forward with information.”
The legislature doubled down on this promise by restating it under Agenda Two. In its implementation strategy, the House went further to set a 2023 deadline — twice — first under security efforts, then under its push for good governance. Both times, the bill’s passage was logged as a short-term goal.
This commitment, along with other reforms, was neatly laid out in the publicly available legislative agenda, which was presented as the foundation for building a more inclusive, people-centred legislative process.
More than 20 months after that deadline, the bill has not made it into law.
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The Whistleblower Protection bill can be traced back to 2016 when Buhari introduced a whistleblower policy. Of course, as a policy, it had no legal powers to protect whistleblowers when it mattered.
Whistleblower protection in Nigeria began its journey to becoming a law in the same year. The bill passed the first and second reading in the Senate in October 2016.
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