A budget is a financial plan that estimates your expected income and expenses over a specific period. For a government, it is a comprehensive financial statement detailing anticipated public revenues and planned expenditures for a fiscal year. A budget provides a roadmap to manage cash flow, control costs, and achieve strategic goals. One of the most desired goals is the development and advancement of society.
Budget is designed to ensure that government earmarks resources for specific purposes, ensuring it does not spend more than it earns. Budgeting helps the government measure its actual performance against initial projections at the end of a fiscal year. This will enable the government understand whether what it achieved at the end of the fiscal year tallies with the objectives set at the planning stage. Whether there were deviations from the objectives when measured with the results achieved at the end of the year. What caused the deviations? If the deviations are substantial, what measures are to be applied to ensure that the deviations are corrected so that future budgets do not deviate from their original plan?
The President is the officer entrusted by the Constitution to prepare the budget for each year. He is mandated to place the prepared budget before the National Assembly for approval. Each budget is modelled by the Constitution to last for 12 months or one year, which the Constitution defines as a financial year. The National Assembly has the duty by law to monitor and oversight how the budget is implemented. It makes appropriate recommendations on how corrections can be made, adjustments can be encouraged, and punishments can be imposed to deter improper budgetary behaviour.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act provides for a quarterly report of the performance of each budget within one month of the end of each quarter in section 30(2) of the Act to enable the National Assembly perform its oversight functions successfully. This emphasises that budget transparency in Nigeria has a legal framework. In Tinubu’s government this deadline is routinely missed by like forever. Late and incomplete reporting breaks the feedback cycle that empowers the National Assembly to perform meaningful oversight. A legislature that cannot assess implementation in real time cannot intervene when execution goes wrong. It can only observe the damage after the fact.
Essentially, none of the constitutional or legal provisions has been met by the Tinubu’s regime. The first budget he made was the 2023 supplementary budget which was not fully implemented till date. He made the 2024, 2025 budgets and none of them was implemented to its full capacity till date. On 31 March 2026, the National Assembly passed a N68.3 trillion budget, the highest in Nigeria’s history. The number is mind-boggling. The implementation record behind it is zero. The problem with Nigeria has always been implementation, not flowery imaginations and concepts which produce fantastic documents that remain on the shelves gathering dusts without due consideration for their realisation.
Senator Munguno of Borno State couldn’t withhold his disappointment recently in the performance of his oversight function of the executive with regards to the budgets of the executive. He screamed that in July 2026, the budget of 2025 had not been complied with. He observed that it is only 18 per cent of the capital budget that had been released. The 2026 budget that was passed into law by 31 March 2026 has not even commenced its implementation. This is budget recklessness at its peak, especially when one considers that all the estimated borrowing budgeted for government spending is always over-borrowed. Munguno reminded Tinubu that this reckless attitude towards the budget is an impeachable offence.
The budget was doom-fated from the beginning as it was inflated even before it was passed. When President Tinubu presented the 2026 Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly in December 2025, it carried a price tag of N58.18 trillion. By the time the Assembly passed it on 31 March 2026, the figure had grown wings and flown to N68.323 trillion, representing an increase of roughly N10 trillion, or about 17 per cent, in the space of a few months.
The addition of N5.71 trillion represented unfinished projects carried over from 2025. These project rollovers are not a technical accounting adjustment, they are an admission that the 2025 budget failed to deliver what it promised. Carrying unfinished work forward normalises a cycle where budgets are passed, funds are allocated, and infrastructures are not built. The National Assembly has previously criticised the recurring practice of rolling unfinished projects from one budget into the next. Tragically, the 2026 budget contains N5.71 trillion of exactly that. What is disheartening is that the same legislature that has raised concerns about rollovers passed a budget that embeds them and extended the 2025 capital budget implementation deadline to June 2026. Even in June 2026 the implementation still fell flat.
Furthermore, the extension directly contradicts a specific commitment made by President Tinubu in December 2025. He assured that Nigeria would henceforth operate on a single budget backed by a single revenue cycle, with no overlaps or rollovers. The promise couldn’t even last for a year. The June 2026 extension means Nigeria is now simultaneously implementing two budgets, precisely the overlapping arrangement the President said would end. The coexistence of the 2025 capital extension and the 2026 budget makes it impossible for the public, the legislature, or independent monitors to clearly track which budget is financing which project, and whether either is being delivered on time.
All these observations and anomalies pales in comparison when one considers the obvious criminality that pervades budget preparation and implementation under Tinubu’s regime. According to Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, the Director General of the controversial Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), his agency received budget allocation of N1.3b as stated by President Tinubu at pages 50 and 51 of the 2026 budget. Tinubu’s government came out to admit that the agency was fake but didn’t deny that the agency was fraudulently allocated N1.3b in its budget. It was only when the allegation of disagreement on the sharing formula broke out, allegedly between the Prince and Tinubu’s Chief of Staff, that Tinubu’s government suddenly realised that the agency was fake. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) is investigating the matter presently even as the accused officers of Tinubu’s government who can influence the investigation are allowed to remain in office.
The N1.3b fake allocation to PFIPC is even a tip of the iceberg. Tinubu government allocated N22.15b to build and renovate 106 traditional rulers palaces nationwide. Understandably, this sparked intense public debate and criticism over fiscal priorities and constitutional boundaries. It is pertinent to note that the matter of traditional institutions is a matter within the legislative competence of states and local governments, not the federal government. Approximately N5.85 billion of the total allocation is tied to 11 palace projects that have no disclosed or known physical locations. Citizens and civil society groups have questioned the timing and priority of spending billions on royal residences amidst high inflation, widespread hunger, and infrastructural deficits in public healthcare and education. This criminality reveals the shame of a nation under Tinubu.
The ICPC has disclosed the existence of more than 908 ghost workers in the public service of Nigeria with more than 500 existing in the police force alone. The commission said this discovery spread across at least 50 federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), exposing a major payroll fraud that allegedly led to the diversion of hundreds of millions of naira. The anti-graft agency said it recovered about N942 million linked to fraudulent salary payments made to the fictitious workers.
In Abia State, N780m was budgeted for 130 selected churches across 13 political wards in Bende Federal Constituency under the budgetary imputation of the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Benjamin Kalu. Nigeria’s federal government earmarked N6.14 billion for 52 mosque projects in the 2026 budget. This funding is part of a larger N8.05 billion allocation for religious sites that also includes N1.91 billion for seven church projects. Citizens and accountability groups are questioning why government funds are used for religious projects instead of basic public infrastructure. They noted that these religious allocations are hidden inside non-religious government ministries, drawing debate that the intention may not be for the wellbeing of mosques and churches, but meant to be shared by the corrupt officials of government in Nigeria under Tinubu. It is possible that the palaces, mosques and churches are not even aware of such allocations in the budget for them. The possibility of their demanding for their implementation would then not even arise. Even if they do, they would be reminded that it is a privilege, not a right for the federal government to grant them such projects as the matters are not the constitutional obligations of the federal government.
The revelations above are minimal compared to the total misappropriation and misapplication of funds under Tinubu’s government. Munguno hinted at impeachment of Tinubu. This would have been the best way out, but for the toothless bulldog nature of the National Assembly. The most honourable thing for Tinubu is to resign. This is the best moral way out of this. Since the name of Tinubu does not respond to morality, it is the duty of Nigerians to ensure that they liberate themselves from this chain and slavery of budget recklessness which will perpetually keep them underdeveloped when they have the opportunity to remove him from office in 2027 through the ballot.
The post Budget recklessness, bane of development in Nigeria under Tinubu appeared first on The Sun Nigeria.
<small>Source: The Sun Nigeria — read the original story there.</small>
