Executive Summary

The Foreign Aid (Regulation, Coordination, Transparency and Disclosure) Bill, 2026, known as Senate Bill 1034 (SB.1034), was sponsored by Senator Ibrahim Hassan Dankwambo and is currently before the Senate Committees on National Planning and Economic Development and Finance. It proposes to place every recipient of foreign aid in Nigeria, including federal and state governments, non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, and private entities, under the oversight of a new Foreign Aid Regulatory Commission (FARC). The Bill has passed second reading and is now at public hearing stage.

The Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC) recognises that transparency and accountability in the management of foreign assistance are legitimate and important policy goals, particularly given the scale of donor funding that flows through Nigeria's development and humanitarian sectors. However, this brief argues that SB.1034, as currently drafted, is a disproportionate instrument. It duplicates existing regulatory machinery, revives a model of civil society control that the National Assembly has rejected on at least four previous occasions, and, through provisions such as Section 11's requirement that funded activities "align" with government development priorities, creates a legal basis for the state to restrict independent civic, human rights, and advocacy work. We recommend the Bill's withdrawal and the pursuit of narrower, risk-based reforms built on the institutions already in place.

Background: What the Bill Proposes

SB.1034 was introduced by Senator Dankwambo (Gombe North), a former Accountant-General of the Federation, and scaled second reading in the Senate on 22 and 23 July 2026 after a lead debate in which lawmakers argued that billions of naira in foreign grants, technical assistance, humanitarian support, and concessional financing enter Nigeria each year with inadequate scrutiny. Senate President Godswill Akpabio and Senator Adams Oshiomhole both spoke in support, framing unregulated foreign funding as a potential national security concern and calling for mandatory disclosure backed by strict sanctions.

If enacted, the Bill would:

• Establish a Foreign Aid Regulatory Commission (FARC) empowered to register, monitor, audit, and sanction all foreign grants, donations, and technical assistance received in Nigeria.

• Require every recipient, whether government agency, NGO, CSO, or private entity, to register with FARC within 30 days of receiving aid, with non-registration made a criminal offence.

• Mandate public disclosure of the source, amount, purpose, conditions, and implementing partners of every grant on a new national register.

• Impose a mandatory annual independent audit, in addition to obligations organisations already meet under existing regulators.

• Require, under Section 11, that foreign-funded activities "align" with Nigeria's national development plans and priorities.

• Integrate donor-funded projects into the national budget framework, creating a National Donor Coordination Framework.

Unlike earlier NGO-specific bills, SB.1034 is framed broadly around "foreign aid" rather than civil society alone, and its sponsors present it primarily as a public financial management and national security measure. In practice, however, NGOs and CSOs, as the largest and most visible channel for foreign development assistance outside government, would bear the heaviest share of its compliance burden.

Past Failed Attempts to pass NGO Regulations 

Nigeria's National Assembly has tried, and failed, to pass comprehensive NGO regulation legislation at least four times since the idea first surfaced in the 8th National Assembly. The 2013 "Bill to Regulate the Acceptance and Utilization of Financial/Material Contributions of Donor Agencies to Voluntary Organisations," sponsored by Hon. Eddie Mbadiwe, was shelved after public hearings drew sustained criticism that it would stifle the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of association. A subsequent NGO Regulatory Commission bill sponsored by the late Hon. Umar Buba Jibril, introduced in 2016, was described by commentators as containing far-reaching, restrictive provisions and was widely condemned as a vehicle to gag civil society; it did not survive the 8th Assembly. A further version resurfaced under Sada Soli in the House of Representatives and again failed to advance.

Each attempt drew the same objection: that a government-appointed commission with powers to register, deregister, and sanction civil society organisations gives the state a discretionary tool to silence organisations that hold it accountable, in violation of Sections 39 and 40 of the 1999 Constitution and Nigeria's obligations under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

No bill has ever received the level of criticism the NGO Bill has. Its quest for a regulatory commission, proponents argue, will assist in checking any likelihood of a civil society organisation being illegally sponsored against the interest of Nigeria. That has been the recurring, and recurringly rejected, logic behind each iteration.

SB.1034 does not use the language of "NGO regulation," but its core architecture, a government commission with registration, audit, and sanction powers over organisations that receive foreign funds, is structurally the same model the National Assembly has repeatedly declined to enact. Framing it as foreign aid coordination rather than NGO control does not change its practical effect on the civil society organisations that rely on that funding to operate.

Reversing a Decade of Reform

The Bill also risks undoing a specific, hard-won regulatory reform. Following a sector-wide risk assessment led by Nigeria's Special Control Unit against Money Laundering (SCUML) from 2022, and the Financial Action Task Force's November 2023 revision of Recommendation 8, which requires governments to take a targeted, risk-based approach to non-profit oversight rather than subjecting the entire sector to blanket regulation, Nigeria removed NGOs from the SCUML reporting-entity list. Civil society advocates note that this outcome was the product of roughly a decade of sustained engagement, and that it was formally credited as a success story at the 3rd Africa High-Level Civil Society AML/CFT Conference held in Abuja in July 2026, days before SB.1034 passed second reading.

SB.1034 would reintroduce, through FARC, substantially the same registration, disclosure, and sanctions burden that the sector had just succeeded in having narrowed, merely relocating it to a new institutional door. Because NGOs already register with the Corporate Affairs Commission and, where applicable, meet anti-money-laundering obligations, a third layer of registration and a mandatory annual independent audit on top of existing ones would add compliance cost without a demonstrated corresponding gain in oversight quality. For smaller, community-based organisations with limited administrative capacity in particular, this could divert scarce resources away from frontline programme delivery.

Section 11 and the Threat to Independent Civic Action

The most consequential provision for civic space is Section 11, which requires that foreign-funded activity "align" with Nigeria's national development plans and priorities. On its face this reads as a coordination measure. In practice, a statutory alignment requirement gives a government commission a legal basis to judge whether human rights monitoring, election observation, investigative research, or advocacy against government policy "aligns" with official priorities, and, by extension, a basis to deny registration, withhold renewal, or sanction organisations whose work is independent of, or critical of, the state.

This concern is not speculative. Analysts reviewing the Bill have specifically flagged that organisations perceived as critical of government could be denied registration or renewal under the proposed framework, and that its reach could extend to religious organisations and informal community savings and welfare schemes that were never envisioned as regulatory targets. Human rights lawyer Chidi Anselm Odinkalu has described the broader NGO regulation push, of which SB.1034 is the latest iteration, as among the most dangerous pieces of legislation to reach the National Assembly since Nigeria's return to democratic rule in 1999.

A coalition of more than 90 civil society organisations has formally called on the National Assembly to withdraw the Bill, and the Movement for the Transformation of Nigeria (MOTION) has separately rejected it in full, arguing that existing laws already provide adequate oversight and that any reform affecting the sector should strengthen, not constrain, civil society's ability to register, govern itself, raise funds, and advocate freely.

Weighing the Legitimate Concerns

It would be a mistake to dismiss the Bill's underlying premise entirely. Nigeria is among the largest recipients of foreign development assistance in Africa, and donor-funded projects are, by multiple accounts, fragmented across ministries, departments and agencies, often implemented outside the national budget framework, resulting in duplication and weak coordination. Improved national visibility into aid flows, including how much is received, from whom, and for what purpose, is a reasonable and internationally consistent objective; many donor governments themselves require comparable transparency of their own aid disbursements.

The question this brief raises is not whether foreign aid should be coordinated and made transparent, but whether a new criminal-liability-backed commission with alignment and sanction powers over civil society is a proportionate way to achieve that objective, when narrower and less restrictive alternatives, discussed below, are available and have precedent in Nigeria's own recent regulatory history.

Criminal Liability as a Disproportionate Tool

SB.1034 does not merely make non-registration an administrative lapse; it makes it a criminal offence, triggered by missing a 30-day registration window after receiving aid. This is a materially different, and much sharper, instrument than the civil penalties, deregistration, or fines used in comparable transparency regimes elsewhere. Criminalising a paperwork deadline exposes NGO staff and leadership to personal legal jeopardy for administrative timing, not for misuse of funds, diversion, or any substantive wrongdoing. Combined with FARC's discretionary sanction and audit powers, this creates a standing mechanism through which an organisation's leadership could face prosecution on essentially procedural grounds, a much higher-stakes lever than anything the sector currently faces under the Corporate Affairs Commission or SCUML.

Constitutional and International Legal Exposure

A commission empowered to register, audit, sanction, and, by implication, deregister organisations based on whether their funded activities "align" with government priorities sits in direct tension with rights the Nigerian state has already committed to protect. Section 39 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) guarantees freedom of expression; Section 40 guarantees freedom of assembly and association, including the right to form or belong to any association for the protection of one's interests. Nigeria is also a signatory to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which protect the same freedoms and constrain the state's ability to condition an organisation's legal existence on approval of its message or mission.

A law that gives a government-appointed commission discretion to deny or revoke registration for organisations whose work does not "align" with official priorities does not need to be enforced broadly to have a chilling effect. The mere existence of that discretion is likely sufficient to alter what organisations are willing to investigate, publish, or advocate for, which is precisely the outcome MOTION, the 90-plus CSO coalition, and rights lawyer Chidi Odinkalu have warned against. Any court challenge to the Bill, should it pass in its current form, would likely turn on exactly this point: whether Sections 11 and the registration and sanction regime constitute a proportionate restriction on constitutionally protected freedoms, or an unconstitutional precondition on their exercise.

Recommendations

• Withdraw SB.1034 in its current form and refer the underlying coordination objective to a genuinely consultative drafting process involving CSOs, donor agencies, and relevant government ministries, as MOTION and the wider CSO coalition have requested.

• Adopt a risk-based, not blanket, oversight model consistent with the FATF's 2023 revision of Recommendation 8, the same standard that justified removing NGOs from the SCUML reporting-entity list in the first place.

• Strengthen and consolidate existing regulators (the Corporate Affairs Commission and SCUML) rather than layering a new commission with overlapping registration, disclosure, and audit powers on top of them.

• Remove or substantially narrow Section 11's alignment requirement, or make clear on the face of the Bill that it cannot be used as grounds to deny, suspend, or revoke registration for organisations whose work is independent of or critical of government policy.

• Exempt religious bodies and informal community savings and welfare schemes from any national aid-coordination framework aimed at institutional donor funding.

• If a coordination database for government-to-government and multilateral aid is the priority, scope the Bill to that purpose specifically, rather than extending criminal-liability registration requirements to private and civil society recipients.

Conclusion

Nigeria's civil society sector has, over the past decade, absorbed and survived four separate legislative attempts to bring it under direct government control, each rejected for the same reason: the risk that a state-appointed commission with registration and sanction powers becomes a tool for silencing accountability work rather than strengthening it. SB.1034 arrives dressed in the language of fiscal coordination and national security, but its core mechanism, and its foreseeable effect on the independent organisations that make up the bulk of Nigeria's foreign-aid-funded civic space, is not meaningfully different. Transparency and accountability in aid management are worth pursuing. They are not well served by legislation that risks repeating, in new form, a model Nigeria's own Parliament has already rejected four times.

Sources
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