Revisiting the Power Probe in the Sixth Legislature and the Missed Opportunity for Reinventing Governance

The travail of the oil subsidy probe is an opportunity to re-examine the implication of probes in the legislature of the fourth republic. The Sixth Legislature offered a fresh perspective to governance after eight years of total emasculation of the Obasanjo regime. Never in the history of representative government in Nigeria had probes been conducted into the activities of previous administration. Military intervention, in sacking representative governments, truncated the development of the process. To this extent and to most Nigerians, probes was certainly novel. Equally novel was the enabling environment that fostered it. Ironically the enabling environment was initially put in place in the dying days of the Obasanjo government. The Yar’adua administration's “commitment” to the rule of law enabled other arms of government to show promises in fulfilling their potentials. The seeming coordination evident in the three arms of government but above all in the legislature, in its effort of policing the activities of the executive, had implications for governance. Using secondary data and content analysis, this paper examines the implication on governance of the power probe of the Sixth Legislature and the missed opportunity for reinventing Nigeria.