Strengthening Legislative Oversight: Comparing The Roles of Civil Society Organisations and the Media in Nigeria and South Africa

Makinde, Wasiu Abiodun

Journal of Governance and Public Policy
Vol. 13 No. 3 (2026): October 2026

The erosion of credible legislative oversight in Nigeria and South Africa raises the question of how civil society organisations and the media ensure transparency and accountability in this function, and what challenges constrain their effectiveness. This study adopted a qualitative, document-based comparative design within the interpretivist paradigm, analysing 51 secondary sources of peer-reviewed articles, media reports, policy documents and archival materials, retrieved from ScienceDirect, JSTOR, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore and DOAJ and screened using the CRAAP test (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose) against defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The study finds that civil society organisations and the media in both countries function as diagonal accountability actors intervening where horizontal oversight by the legislature is weak, but that this diagonal accountability operates in two distinct modes: a supplementary mode in Nigeria, where civil society and media activity is oriented toward supplying the legislature with information and analytical capacity to strengthen its own oversight function, and a substitutive mode in South Africa, where litigation and investigative journalism more often produce accountability outcomes in place of a legislature constrained by one-party dominance. Both countries' civil society and the media face comparable but differently weighted constraints, such as legal repression, shrinking civic space, funding instability, and, for the media, economic pressures, including "brown envelope" journalism. The study concluded that civil society and the media constituted a viable diagonal accountability mechanism that compensates for weaknesses in horizontal legislative oversight. However, the form this compensation takes is shaped by the specific institutional causes of that weakness in each country, and further comparison with courts, audit institutions, and anti-corruption agencies is needed to establish their relative contributions to legislative accountability.