Who Will Regulate The Regulators?
By Adamu Lawal Toro
Every few years, the National Assembly rediscovers the non-governmental organisation and decides it needs a leash.
In 2016, it was the NGO Regulatory Commission Bill. The public pushed back at a stormy hearing, and the bill died quietly. Ten years later, the idea is back, and this time it has company.
In the Senate, the Foreign Aid (Regulation, Transparency and Disclosure) Bill 2026, sponsored by Senator Ibrahim Hassan Dankwambo of Gombe North, passed second reading in July. It would create a Foreign Aid Regulatory Commission with powers to register, inspect, audit, sanction, suspend and shut down any organisation that receives foreign funding. Recipients would have 30 days to register. Failure could cost an individual at least ₦5 million, an organisation at least ₦20 million, or up to five years in prison. Section 11 requires foreign-funded projects to “align” with national development priorities.
In the House of Representatives, a separate NGO regulation bill has passed second reading. According to the legal scholar and former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Chidi Odinkalu, it would require organisations, including religious bodies, schools and hospitals, to obtain federal licences renewable every two years. Operating without one could attract 18 months in jail.
“Before you raise money in your church or mosque,” Odinkalu warned, “you need Abuja’s permission.”
Let us be fair to the sponsors. The concerns behind these bills are not imaginary.
Nigeria has seen charities used as fronts for money laundering. Security agencies have long worried about terror financing hidden inside humanitarian cash. Some NGOs operate with little transparency, publish no accounts and answer to foreign donors more readily than to the communities they claim to serve. Billions of dollars in aid flow into the country every year, and Nigerians are entitled to know where they go.
Accountability is a fair demand. The question is whether these bills deliver it, or something else.
Start with duplication. NGOs in Nigeria already register with the Corporate Affairs Commission. Their finances are already subject to SCUML, the NFIU, the EFCC, the ICPC and the tax authorities. The Money Laundering Act of 2022 and the Companies and Allied Matters Act of 2020 already give the state teeth. If these agencies are failing, the answer is to make them work, not to create a new commission with new offices, new staff and new opportunities for the old Nigerian problem of permits for sale.
Then there is the vagueness. What are “national priorities”? Who defines “public interest”? A government that dislikes election monitors, human rights lawyers or anti-corruption campaigners will find it easy to decide that their work does not “align.” When the law is vague, the regulator becomes the law.
Consider the timing. These bills arrive months before a general election, when independent observers, fact-checkers and civic groups matter most. Nigerians cannot be blamed for asking whether the target is terror financing or criticism.
And consider who will pay the price. Not the big international NGOs with lawyers in Abuja. The burden will fall on the small community group in Bauchi feeding displaced families, the women’s cooperative supported by a modest foreign grant, the mosque committee raising funds for widows, and the church clinic treating the poor where government hospitals have failed.
These are the institutions that have filled the gaps the state abandoned. Now the state wants them to ask permission to keep filling them.
There is an irony here that the National Assembly should not miss. The same government that cannot account for its own spending wants every charity to account to it. The same legislature that resists publishing its own budget in detail wants civil society to open its books on demand. Transparency is a fine principle. It should begin at home.
None of this means the National Assembly should do nothing. It should strengthen the agencies that already exist. It should require large NGOs to publish audited accounts, as many already do. It should punish fraud and terror financing with the full weight of the law. But reporting failures should attract administrative penalties, not prison. And any regulator must answer to the courts, with clear limits on its powers and a right of appeal.
Lawmakers should remember why civil society exists. It exists because no government, however well-meaning, can be trusted to watch itself.
In the end, the measure of these bills will not be how many organisations they register or how many fines they collect.
It will be whether the widow in a village outside Bauchi still receives her monthly support from the mosque, without someone in Abuja deciding that her hunger does not align with national priorities.
Toro is a journalist based in Bauchi.