An Overview of Legislative Oversight and Accountability Mechanisms in Nigeria and South Africa

Abstract

With different governing systems but similar ideals of policy outcomes, Nigeria and South Africa represent prototypes of limited government. In spite of their authoritarian backgrounds, their constitutions provide for dispersion of powers among institutions of government (Steytler 2016). Unlike their previous authoritarian regimes, there are constitutional limitations on the exercise of power by the institutions of government. South Africa’s hybrid of presidential and parliamentary features incorporates the principle of separation of powers among the legislature, executive and the judiciary. The entire executive, comprising of the Cabinet and Deputy Ministers, are directly accountable to the legislature. Similarly, Nigeria’s presidential system espouse the ideals of separation of legislative and presidential powers with an independent judiciary. This devolution of powers, as Steytler (2016, pp.282–283) has noted, was significant in ‘turning the Leviathan on its head through the articulation of the core values of a people-centered sovereignty’.