A civic record for Nigeria
See what was decided, who decided it, and what it cost.
Bills and their sponsors. Budget lines and what was actually spent. Police units and the complaints against them. Courts and their judgments. One register, free to read without an account — and, with a verified voter's card, a place to act on it under your own name.
What the register has to cover
- 36
- states, plus the FCT
- 109
- seats in the Senate
- 360
- seats in the House
- 774
- local governments
Coverage is being filled in state by state, chamber by chamber. Where we do not have a record yet, the page says so rather than guessing — a blank we admit to is worth more than a number we invented.
Six registers
Accountability fails when the record is scattered.
Most of this is already public. It is also spread across a dozen PDFs, three gazettes and a website that was last updated in 2019. Becoming puts it in one place and keeps it legible.
- 01
Representatives & executives
Every senator, House member, governor and commissioner on one register — their chamber, their state, their record. Not their press release.
Open → - 02
The floor
Bills as they move: sponsor, chamber, reading, full text. React to the bill and comment on it, rather than on a headline about it.
Open → - 03
The money
Appropriation, revision and actual spend, line by line and ministry by ministry. The gap between the first figure and the last one is usually the story.
Open → - 04
The Force
Units, officers, incidents and formal complaints. Every report keeps a reference number, so a case cannot be quietly closed and forgotten.
Open → - 05
The courts
Judges, cases and judgments written in plain language, so precedent is not locked behind a law library.
Open → - 06
The ballot
Every race and every aspirant, and results by state as they are reported, checked and declared — with the Section 134 arithmetic worked in the open, not announced.
Open →
Take part
Reading the record is the start. The rest is done under your own name.
Everything below is signed with a verified voter's card: one person, one signature, one vote in a poll. That is what makes a number on this site mean something, and it is why the count on a petition here is worth more than a million anonymous likes.
Petitions
Raise one against a named office, or add your name to one. Signatures are one per verified voter and the count is the rows, not a number somebody typed. The page shows the count against the goal and the days left; when it closes, it says so.
One signature per verified voterOpen →Town halls
Live sessions with an open floor and a running poll, and every vote and message landing on every screen as it happens. Where a session is streamed on video, the recording stays on the page afterwards. A poll here is a show of hands, not a ballot.
Floor, poll and live updates; recording when streamedOpen →Volunteering
Community projects carry a completion bar, a funding bar and a volunteer bar. Pledge hours to one under your name: you go on its contributors list, and its volunteer count moves by exactly one. Change your hours any time.
A pledge is a row, not a phone numberOpen →Donations
Not live yetEvery project shows what it needs and what it has, and every donor is on its contributors list by name. The payment rail is not connected yet, so the site takes no money today and shows nothing as given that was not.
Opens when payments doOpen →Protests
Find one near you and say you are going: one row per person, not a click counter. When the organiser has notified the police, the listing names the division and the date, so you know that before you turn up. Listings are published by moderators for now.
Police notification on the listingOpen →Freedom of Information
File a request against a ministry or agency from the site and keep its reference. The FOI Act 2011 gives them seven days to answer, and the page counts them down.
Seven-day clock on every requestOpen →
Read without an account. Act with a verified one.
Signing up takes a minute. Verification checks your voter's card against the INEC register and is reviewed by a person, so it takes longer, and it is what stops one voice counting twice.
The money
A naira budgeted is not a naira spent.
Becoming carries the appropriation, every revision to it, and the actual spend against it — down to the line item, for each ministry. Execution rate is shown next to the headline figure, because the headline figure on its own has never told anyone very much.
Each ministry's page in the governance register lists the contracts it has awarded and the FOI requests filed against it. Where the record stops, you can file a Freedom of Information request against that ministry from the same page.
The Force
A complaint that keeps its reference number.
In October 2020 a great many Nigerians discovered how little survives of a complaint once it has been handed across a counter. The register is the answer to that: file an incident, name the unit or the officer, and the entry stays public whatever happens next.
Corrections are made in the open. If something here about you or your command is wrong, we amend the record rather than delete it, so the change is auditable too.
How it works
Read without an account. Act with a verified one.
- 01
Read first
Every register on Becoming is open. No account, no paywall, and no sign-in wall in front of a budget line. You should be able to check us before you join us.
Start with the budget → - 02
Verify once
Enter your voter's card number. An administrator checks it against the INEC register by hand. It happens once, and then it is done.
How verification works → - 03
Then act
Endorse an aspirant, sign a petition, file a police complaint, request a document under FOI. Your name is attached to it — that is the whole point of verifying.
Create an account →
One thing we will not do
An endorsement here is not a ballot.
Real elections are physical, they are run by INEC, and their results are recorded separately. What Becoming shows is platform sentiment: who the citizens on here say they would back. We keep the two numbers apart on every page that carries both, and we always will.
A civic platform that blurs that line is not a civic platform. It is a rumour with a progress bar.
See how results are shown
Why it is called Becoming
“Inside the cocoon, the caterpillar does not look like it is turning into anything. It looks like it is coming apart. That is the part everyone mistakes for the end. We would like to be the people keeping an accurate record of it.”
Victor O. Adeniji
Founder, Becoming
On your phone
The record, in your pocket.
Becoming for iPhone and Android is the same register as this site, built against the same API, with the two things a phone is for: telling you when something you care about moves, and staying readable when the network does not.
Submitted to the App Store, awaiting Apple's review. In closed testing on Google Play.
Both builds are in. Play makes a new publisher run a closed test before it will review a public listing, so Android follows iOS. The moment a store approves, its badge appears here — and not a day before, because a badge that goes nowhere is a lie with a logo on it. Everything the app does, this site does now.
Told when it moves
Today that is one alert: a published article, pushed to the phone the moment it goes up. Nothing else notifies yet; each further alert gets added on purpose, not by default.
Reads on a bad connection
What you have already opened stays readable when the network drops. It refreshes when the signal comes back, not before you can read it.
The same account, the same rules
One sign-in, one verified voter's card, the same register. Nothing you can do on the phone that you cannot do here, and nothing hidden from either.
Becoming
Dashboard · News · Bills · Community · Protests · Oversight · Me
Appropriation Bill passes second reading in the Senate
Published · pushed to your phone
Constitution (Sixth Alteration) Bill sent to the state assemblies
Needs 24 of 36 · Section 9
Idumota market rebuild timetable
You signed · one signature per voter
Start with whichever one of them annoys you most.
You do not need an account to read any of it, and we would rather you looked before you signed up. When you do want to endorse, petition or report, verification takes one voter's card number.