Nigeria’s fiscal system is in chaotic flux. This is evidenced by the Federal Government’s latest budget extension. It indicts the country’s entire system of fiscal planning, public expenditure, and democratic accountability.
Now, the National Assembly has, for the fourth time, extended the implementation of the capital component of the 2025 Appropriation Act, this time from September 30 to December 31, 2026.
President Bola Tinubu subsequently assented to the amendment, meaning that a budget originally meant to expire on December 31, 2025, will remain alive for an entire additional year.
Worse, nothing suggests that another extension is off the table.
Senate Leader Opeyemi Bamidele said the extension was necessary because implementation had not reached optimal levels despite releases to MDAs. The Senate cited the need to complete funded projects already at advanced stages, sustain economic activity, pay contractors, utilise released funds and improve public service delivery.
It stressed that no new projects were being introduced. The previous extensions, from March to June and then September 2026, were justified for basically the same reasons, as only 30 per cent of the N23.96 trillion 2025 capital vote was implemented during the fiscal year.
But the lawmakers have conspicuously failed to explain why Nigeria repeatedly needs extra time to spend money that it has already appropriated.
The Tinubu administration came to power promising to eliminate Nigeria’s notorious overlapping budget cycles. In December 2025, the President said the government would move away from multiple overlapping budgets and operate within a single revenue cycle. Yet the 2025 capital budget remains alive alongside the 2026 budget.
Last year, aspects of the 2023, 2024 and 2025 budgets were being implemented simultaneously. There could not be a more potent formula for confusion, opacity, wastage and corruption.
The budget is supposed to be the principal instrument for translating policy into measurable development.
Instead, it has become an elastic political document whose lifespan can be repeatedly stretched whenever government fails to execute it within the period originally approved.
That destroys the meaning of a budget.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 is explicit in establishing guardrails against this recurring anomaly.
Section 18 provides that the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework “shall be the basis for the preparation” of the annual budget and requires expenditure allocations to be consistent with the government’s medium-term developmental priorities.
The MTEF and Fiscal Strategy Paper submission deadline is four months before the start of the next fiscal year, but Tinubu transmitted the 2026-2028 MTEF in December 2025; the 2025-2027 MTEF in November 2024; and the 2024-2026 MTEF in October 2023.
Section 19 requires the budget to be accompanied by revenue and expenditure projections, analysis of previous performance, monthly revenue targets, cost-control measures and a fiscal-risk assessment.
Section 25 requires an Annual Cash Plan to be prepared in advance, setting out projected monthly cash flows. Section 26 then requires the Minister to prepare and publish a disbursement schedule within 30 days of enactment of the Appropriation Act.
More importantly, Section 28 says that where projected revenue is insufficient, the Minister is to restrict further commitments according to the criteria contained in the fiscal-risk framework. He cannot simply allow the spending programme to drift indefinitely.
And Section 27 is unambiguous: money appropriated for a specific purpose “shall be used solely for the purpose specified in the Appropriation Act.”
Then comes the transparency requirement. Section 30 requires quarterly monitoring and reporting of budget implementation, with the report published “not later than 30 days after the end of each quarter.”
Section 48 requires the Federal Government to ensure “full and timely disclosure and wide publication” of transactions and decisions involving public revenues and expenditures.
Yet compliance is routinely treated as optional.
BudgIT stated in 2025 that the Federal Government had failed to publish quarterly Budget Implementation Reports within the statutory period, describing the failure as a violation of the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
The Auditor-General’s performance audit has also identified irregular budget cycles and low capital implementation as longstanding problems, noting that delays in preparation, approval and execution have persisted for decades.
What is the point of passing laws if government can routinely ignore their deadlines without consequence?
What Nigerians see, which the government fails to admit, is that Nigeria has a planning problem disguised as a cash problem.
There is no doubt that Nigeria has genuine fiscal constraints. Revenue is volatile. Debt service is heavy. Inflation raises project costs. Procurement can be painfully slow. Government agencies have capacity weaknesses. Cash releases can arrive late.
But these are not sufficient excuses for perpetual rollover. They are precisely the risks that competent budgeting is supposed to anticipate.
The deeper problem is poor planning followed by political optimism and legislative interference via “budget padding.”
Governments routinely construct expenditure plans around revenue assumptions that are more aspirational than credible. When reality intervenes, rather than scaling commitments early and transparently, government carries them forward.
The result is a vicious mishmash of unrealistic revenue forecasts, unrealistic expenditure commitments, poor cash availability, delayed implementation, extensions and overlapping budgets, which obscure performance and accountability.
BudgIT reported that the National Assembly inserted 11,122 projects worth about N6.93 trillion into the 2025 budget, or 12.5 per cent of the initial N54.99 trillion appropriation.
Such practices cannot be reconciled with a fiscal framework supposedly driven by a three-year MTEF, strategic priorities, cost control and fiscal-risk analysis.
Nigeria’s budget dysfunction predates Tinubu’s administration, but he has failed to cure it.
Indeed, Tinubu inherited a particularly messy situation. The 2023 budget and its supplementary budget were carried into 2024, while the 2024 budget itself was already running. The 2024 capital budget was subsequently extended into 2025.
What is particularly damning is that the Tinubu administration recognised the problem, promised to end overlapping budgets, but has nevertheless presided over another extension of the same practice.
While national budget demands scrutiny and accountability, slow and partial implementation of capital provisions cannot produce platforms required to diversify and grow the economy, build infrastructure and reduce poverty.
Countries like India have deliberately elevated capital expenditure as a central growth strategy. Its 2024-25 budget provided $115.27 billion in capital expenditure, equivalent to 3.4 per cent of GDP, while the government also publishes detailed budget documents and outcome statements.
More importantly, India’s budget architecture links financial allocations to measurable outputs and outcomes. Its Outcome Budget presents what programmes are expected to deliver, not merely how much money they receive. The government also publishes regular monthly and half-yearly fiscal reviews.
The results are not perfect as expected in any large democracy, but the institutional principle is fundamentally different. It’s plan, appropriate, release, monitor, measure and report.
Nigeria should learn the value of predictable execution and measurable outcomes because it simply cannot afford this perpetual budgetary sloppiness.
The Revised National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan envisages roughly $2.3 trillion of infrastructure investment over 2020–2043, with the accelerated requirement reaching about $100 billion annually. The African Development Bank has similarly estimated that Nigeria needs more than $100 billion annually for three decades to close its infrastructure gap.
Against such a deficit, a government that cannot reliably execute its own capital budget is wasting both administrative and development time. That is what foolishness looks like.
The result has been Nigeria’s eye-watering list of abandoned projects. The Chartered Institute of Project Managers of Nigeria and the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors estimate that Nigeria has 56,000 uncompleted or abandoned projects nationwide valued at over N17 trillion.
Delayed or abandoned projects in roads, power, health, and education because of budgeting, planning and implementation shortcomings translate into a plethora of missed opportunities for increased productivity, job creation and uplifting living standards. Nigeria cannot continue this way.
Ultimately, it is the poor who pay.
The latest extension should therefore be the last.
The government must restore faith in its own budget. Projects should enter the capital budget only when they are properly designed, costed, prioritised and capable of being executed within the fiscal horizon.
The government should cancel the sleazy constituency projects by the legislature.
Political and unfunded insertions must be eliminated. The Fiscal Responsibility Act must be enforced. The budget must once again become a binding instrument of national development rather than a revolving door of political promises.
