By Kareem Abdulrasaq
In February this year, the Senate Committee on Appropriations summoned the federal government’s economic team and delivered a blunt verdict: the revenue assumptions behind the proposed ₦58.47 trillion 2026 budget were unrealistic, oil projections were not credible, and capital implementation in recent years had been so poor that lawmakers openly asked whether the budget should be cut. The committee chairman pointed to oil revenue performance of 18 per cent in one recent year and asked how anyone could project 36.5 per cent the next.
Weeks later, the same National Assembly passed the budget not reduced, but enlarged by more than ₦9 trillion, to ₦68.32 trillion, the largest appropriation in Nigeria’s history. A parliament that declares a budget too optimistic and responds by making it bigger is telling us something important: the annual budget has stopped functioning as an instrument of fiscal control. It survives as a ritual, a bargaining table, and a signalling document. But the thing a budget exists to do bind the state to a credible plan for raising and spending public money is no longer happening.
What a budget is for
An appropriation act is supposed to perform two functions at once. It authorises spending, and it limits it. The ceiling is the point. When the ceiling moves whenever it is inconvenient, when revenue targets are set with no serious expectation of being met, and when money is spent outside the document entirely, the budget becomes what accountants would call a memorandum item: recorded, gazetted, ceremonially signed and not binding on anyone.
Consider the evidence from just the current cycle.
The revenue numbers are fiction, and everyone involved knows it. The federal government itself admitted realising only about ₦10 trillion of the ₦40 trillion revenue it targeted for 2025, a performance rate of roughly 25 per cent.
The head of the Nigeria Revenue Service put it plainly to senators: if you think you have ten naira and plan with a hundred in mind, you create problems for yourself. Yet the 2026 framework projects ₦36.87 trillion in revenue against ₦68.32 trillion in expenditure, a deficit larger than the entire realised revenue of last year. When the projections failed to add up, the borrowing plan was quietly raised mid-course from ₦17.89 trillion to ₦29.20 trillion. A budget whose financing plan can expand by ₦11 trillion after passage is not controlling anything; it is chasing events.
The ceiling floats upward on contact
The ₦9 trillion added between proposal and passage was framed as accommodating “legacy commitments.” Some of it genuinely regularises unpaid obligations to contractors, itself an indictment of earlier budgets. But the enlargement also carried the familiar cargo of constituency insertions. Only this week, the National Commission for Almajiri and Out-of-School Children’s Education publicly distanced itself from projects in its own budget, explaining that they were National Assembly constituency projects assigned to it for implementation, these projects it neither conceived nor considers within its mandate. When an agency created to tackle the out-of-school children crisis is statutorily obliged to execute unrelated projects nominated by lawmakers, appropriation has been inverted: the legislature is no longer scrutinising the executive’s spending plan; it is writing its own spending into other people’s mandates.
The fiscal year has dissolved. As of early 2026, the government was simultaneously paying for 2024 capital projects, implementing the 2025 capital budget (its deadline extended first to March, then to June 2026), and commencing the 2026 budget. Three appropriation acts running concurrently means no single one of them describes what the state is actually doing with money at any moment. The government’s promised “fiscal reset” ending overlapping budgets and chronic rollovers was the right diagnosis. The extension of the 2025 capital deadline into the middle of 2026 shows how quickly the cure was postponed.
The accountability loop never closes.
Control is not only about what is approved; it is about consequences when approval is ignored. Ministries record zero releases against approved allocations, capital performance disappoints year after year, and the Auditor-General’s findings arrive late and are acted upon rarely. Nobody is sanctioned when an appropriation is not implemented; nobody is sanctioned when spending occurs outside it. A rule without consequences is advice.
Why citizens should care
This may sound like an argument for technicians. It is not. When the budget stops binding, the costs land on ordinary Nigerians through three channels. First, deficits that were never honestly planned get financed anyway, through debt whose servicing already consumes ₦15.81 trillion in 2026, more than the allocations to health and education combined, on a public debt stock that closed 2025 at about ₦159 trillion. Every naira of debt service is a naira pre-committed before a single teacher is paid. Second, unrealistic budgets guarantee arbitrary implementation. When only a fraction of projected revenue arrives, someone in the executive decides outside any appropriation debate which projects get funded and which get abandoned. The published budget promised everything; the cash office quietly chooses. That discretion is where influence, not need, determines outcomes, and it is the poorest constituencies, with the least voice, whose projects die first. Third, credibility compounds. Citizens asked to accept new taxes and tariff adjustments are entitled to ask what happened to the last trillions. A decade of budgets with no visible connection between allocation and lived improvement has drained the social contract. Fiscal reform that raises revenue into a broken control system simply feeds the leak.
Restoring the ceiling
The remedies are not mysterious, and civic organisations in Nigeria have pressed most of them: anchor budgets on independently stress-tested revenue baselines, with published sensitivity analyses for oil price, production and exchange-rate assumptions; hold mandatory mid-year reviews that adjust spending to actual revenue, in public, rather than letting the cash office ration in private. To these I would add four harder edges.
Cap in-year expansion. Any increase of the appropriation beyond a small threshold should require a supplementary budget with the same scrutiny as the original, not an accommodation folded into passage.
Publish constituency projects as data: sponsor, location, cost, implementing agency, and completion status, in machine-readable form. Insertion thrives in opacity; sunlight is cheap.
End the rollover economy with a genuine hard stop. Unspent capital should lapse and re-compete in the next budget, forcing realistic annual plans instead of a perpetual backlog that no one can audit.
Give budget failure a consequence. Accounting officers of MDAs with chronic non-implementation, and of agencies executing outside mandate, should answer publicly and the Auditor-General’s reports should trigger time-bound responses enforced by the Public Accounts Committees.
None of this requires new theory. It requires the National Assembly to remember that its power of the purse is a duty of restraint, not a licence for insertion; and the executive to accept that a smaller budget that binds is worth more than a record budget that does not.
Nigeria has crossed ₦68 trillion on paper. The real milestone worth chasing is more modest and far rarer: a budget the government intends to keep. Until then, we should stop calling the annual document a fiscal plan. A budget that cannot say no to lawmakers, to ministries, to its own assumptions is not a control. It is a wish list with a gazette number.
Kareem Abdulrasaq is a socioeconomic researcher based in Abuja, Nigeria. He writes on public finance, poverty, and development policy. He is an Agora Policy Writing Fellow (Cohort II) and a PhD candidate in Political Science (Political Economy and Development Studies) at Nasarawa State University.
