The culture of budgeting, an ancient short-term fiscal management tool and the grundnorm of public financing, has weakened significantly under President Bola Tinubu, undermining the fundamental principles that define its efficiency – predictability in terms of schedule, clarity, accountability, transparency, balance, comprehensiveness, conservatism, and, most especially, economy.

What is spared in the ‘great transfusion’ of the past three years is the canon of flexibility. And that, the government has stretched beyond its limit – to suggest an infinite loop where it can throw in executive inertia, legislative recklessness, political ‘compensations’, official graft, bureaucratic laxity, figure and line-item padding and sundry fiscal manipulations that breed everything except prudent public spending.

Instead of serving as a predictable yearly fiscal blueprint, the yearly budget has become a fluid document, repeatedly extended, revised and implemented alongside previous appropriations, creating a chaotic fiscal environment of poorly executed programmes and passively monitored projects.

The erosion of fiscal discipline has weakened legislative oversight, reduced public accountability and diminished the credibility of the national fiscal frameworks. This sets a corrupted template for sub-nationals, leaving over 200 million Nigerians with near-zero value yearly at the expense of a handful of emergency billionaires the faulty fiscal systems create.

The few weeks, the country has been regaled with allegations and counter-allegations about a ghost agency – the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) – that had successfully ‘smuggled’ N1.3 billion into the 2026 budget. Investigations into the scam remain inconclusive, but the mere realisation that a non-existent agency could even be listed on the expenditure line items and scaled legislative hurdles before it was shut down makes a mockery of the supposedly hallowed process, many commentators have suggested.

The PFIPC saga stretched budget padding episodes, which gained media attention during late President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, to its dreadful limit. The scale of official manipulation involved and the profiles of individuals indicted raise questions about whether Adeniyi Adeyemi’s PFIPC scandal is an unknown quantity in the budget process.

For over a decade, the Federal Government has struggled in vain to reduce its budget deficit to a manageable level. In many cases, fiscal deficits were as high as 100 per cent of earned revenue. In 2024, the last fully reported budget, the total deficit was N13.51 trillion, 47 per cent above the projected N9.17 trillion and 128 per cent of the N10.55 trillion the government carried over from the 2023 appropriation.

For an economy of Nigeria’s scale, N13.5 trillion yearly deficits should not be a head-shaking issue. But it seems this is a disturbing hole. First, in revenue terms, it was nearly 65 per cent of the total retained revenue, pegged at N21 trillion.

Still, the revenue performance was relatively good compared with the capital expenditure deficit, assuming the government is strategically offsetting today’s liabilities with future earning potential. The composite capital expenditure by the Federal Government, its owned enterprises and multilateral-tied capital spending in the same year was N11.59 trillion or 86 per cent of the fiscal deficit. Padding, ghost allocation and other corruption-related provisions, as exemplified by the Adeyemi case, may have reduced this to 50 per cent or less.

And the government is not slowing down in its liability ‘portfolio’ expansion. To bridge the huge gap created by the expansionary fiscal policy, which pushed total expenditure to N34.5 trillion, the government increased its debt stock by an additional N12.63 trillion – about N1 trillion above the capital expenditure (N11.59 trillion) that was 17 per cent or N1.98 trillion funded with multilateral-tied loans.

Effectively, the government emerged from the ashes of the 2024 budget cycle with about N14.5 trillion in loans and scanty projects valued at N9.6 trillion, assuming every kobo released for capital spending delivered on its promise. Sadly, the recurrent expenditure projection of N19.54 trillion was overrun by N1.62 trillion while capital expectation underperformed by 16 per cent.

It would be tolerable if these were isolated data. They represent a history of under-performance, misplaced priorities and poorly-executed fiscal frameworks.

For the first time in recent years, in 2023, the Federal Government overshot its revenue target – N12.49 trillion versus N11.05 trillion, while recurrent expenditure was kept within limit at N15.64 trillion (still significantly higher than the government’s revenue). In the same year, ironically, the 7.56 trillion capital component underperformed by N1.6 trillion, underpinning the historical poor commitment to using the budget for the common good.

Fresh debt accumulation was also higher, though slightly, than the total capital expenditure, which consisted of equality spending, government-owned enterprises (GOE) released and multilateral-institution-funded projects.

Like the previous year, the sinking fund to retire matured loans received zero savings in 2023, which may have also worsened the sovereign debt sustainability risk. In 2024, the government remitted N265.86 billion, a negligible 2.1 per cent of the additional debt liabilities it procured.

There is no doubt the government has a running battle with fiscal mismatch – huge borrowing, high cost of debt service, extremely low revenue as well as weak infrastructure funding that is only turbocharged by a poorly articulated public-private partnership (PPP) framework. This challenge, according to budget implementation report (BIR) data analysed by The Guardian, further deteriorated in the twilight of the Buhari administration, leading to the first years of Tinubu’s administration.

For instance, whereas the government accumulated a total net budget-finance debt of N33.42 trillion in the five years covering 2020 to 2024, the total capital expenditure was N23.66 trillion, translating to a capital expenditure to revenue debt ratio of 70.8 per cent. This suggests that close to N10 trillion of the net debt incurred in the period went into recurrent expenditure financing.

Capital expenditure, the strongest transmission channel of the yearly budget, needs to be robust for the majority to feel the impact of the ritual of the budget in the long run. At N23.66 trillion in five years, per capita spending of the line item in the five years was N109.032.

The situation improved in the first two years of Tinubu, with average capital expenditure to net debt ratio climbing to 83 per cent. But that still clearly undermined the provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), which stipulate that debt should be incurred for capital spending. Economists have also agreed that the country is not on the path to debt sustainability until it begins to tie debt to specific projects with strong cash-flow or economic growth potential.

From 2020, the capital expenditure-to-revenue ratio also deteriorated to 47.4 per cent, which means only 47 kobo out of every N1 earned was used on infrastructure delivery, while the remaining 50 per cent plus revenue and the debt incurred in the period was lavished on salaries, debt service and overhead. According to data, the government mobilised a total of N49.9 trillion in the period as against actual capital expenditure of N23.66 trillion.

Meanwhile, the total fiscal deficit widened to N38.93 trillion, pushing the unfunded deficit in the five-year cycle to N5.51 trillion. As the deficit widened while the funding window tightened, the government cut down significantly on its capital expenditure plan. As in the case of 2021, only N1.9 trillion or a negligible 40 per cent of the earmarked N4.75 trillion was released for capital projects.

Retained revenue has improved significantly under Tinubu, rising from N7.7 trillion in 2022 to N20.98 trillion in 2024 – about a 200 per cent upswing. This has also reduced the debt service-to-revenue ratio. The President’s media team has credited ‘Tinubunomics’ (a pro-capitalist leaning on which the administration drives its economic recovery on improved inflow and subsidy removal), but the critical mass outside the government sees the rise as mirroring his insensitivity to poor citizens and tax obsession.

Coming ahead of the election year when the President’s mandate would test revalidation, there were lofty expectations about the 2026 appropriation. Ahead of its presentation, the Presidency sent a bill to the National Assembly seeking re-enactment of the 2024 and 2025 budgets. As at the last quarter, the former was still running while the latter had reportedly not commenced implementation.

With the government still not coming out clean on allegations of ghost allocations, provision for frivolity (including sectional religious projects) and nearly N9 trillion shadow spending last year alone as claimed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 2026 appropriation could pass as the worst-managed fiscal document in the country’s recent history.

With 2025 budget implementation still running, the government does not seem to be coming close to ending overlapping budgets as promised. And three fiscal cycles behind it, there are reports that some contracts awarded under the 2023 financing cycle are still awaiting settlement. Payment of the obligations with current or future revenue could undermine accountability, clarity in reporting and annuality ideals of yearly budgeting while advancing the perception of a lack of coordinated approach to budget implementation on the part of the government.

The events of the last two months make a break from the dark fiscal policy era more like a dream. Even in the days of the military era, budget presentations were expected with eagerness and anxiety. They represented the doctrine of trust or lack of it in the economic direction of the juntas.

Even with iron fists, the national budgets they supervised were significantly efficient with measurable successes. Milestone projects such as the Third Mainland Bridge, Federal Capital Territory and many infrastructure projects of national significance were conceived and delivered by military administrators. With corruption taking a larger chunk of government revenue, the current appropriation may need a reset to deliver on the promise of democracy the country fought to dismiss the military for.

Apart from corruption allegations, the 2026 Appropriation Act is battling a confidence crisis that is rooted in its fundamental assumptions. When President Tinubu presented the 2026 Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly, it carried a price tag of N58.18 trillion. Even at a N34 trillion revenue target, the government was hoping it could surpass the 2023 2023 performance. With the expenditure envelope marked by an additional N10.1 trillion, the National Assembly has extended the journey by miles for the national economic managers.

At N68.3 trillion, the government is planning to spend over three times its last reported earnings. For a country that has expanded its debt burden to a limit and exhausted the fiscal headroom, a conservative revenue assumption setting seems to be the most appropriate approach to budgeting. The government had struggled in the recent past to achieve even 80 per cent of its target revenue. In some cases, it recorded less than 60 per cent, raising concerns about whether some governments continue to set benchmarks considered spurious.

There are other unresolved concerns – a budget whose execution timeline is only known to the executive. Before Tinubu assumed office, the government said it had reverted to December execution. There were some variations. Today, the execution cycle is at the pleasure of the Federal Executive Council (FEC). Also, the presentation timeline, as well as the transmission of the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework/Fiscal Strategy Paper (MTEF/FSP), which should set the blueprint of the budget, to the National Assembly, which are clearly defined by the FRA, are largely matters of executive discretion.

For an administration that has embraced consolidated budget implementation, a flawed transparency tag that mirrors carried-over and overlapping implementation burden, the minimum expected from the government could be a timely quarterly report to help citizens keep track of ongoing projects. Unfortunately, seven months into the year, the fourth quarter report of the 2025 budget has not been made public, which could potentially blur the line between works completed under last year’s regime and the supposedly running budget (2026). (The Guardian)

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