Nigeria's 2026 Budget: Big Numbers, Small Intentions
A legal, social and public finance reading of Nigeria's 2026 Appropriation Bill, and why it looks uncomfortably familiar.
By John Onyeukwu | Lawyer, Governance and Social Impact Practitioner | Published in The Accountable Reform https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Va6de2U7oQhkR1uYDA1S | Jan 15, 2025
Every national budget tells a story. Not the ceremonial speech that accompanies it or the glossy summaries circulated afterwards, but the quieter narrative hidden in the details: what is funded generously, what is rationed cautiously, and what is simply rolled over because it has always been so. Read carefully, Nigeria's 2026 Appropriation Bill tells a familiar and uncomfortable story, one of scale without direction, numbers without intention.
At headline level, the budget looks expansive. Trillions are allocated, sectors are covered, and virtually every arm of government is represented. Yet this sense of abundance dissolves on closer inspection. What emerges instead is a pattern that has persisted through the 2024 and 2025 budgets: a state that budgets competently for its own comfort, but cautiously, almost reluctantly, for social transformation.
Perhaps the most striking continuity across the 2024, 2025 and now 2026 budgets is the resilience of executive-centric spending. The Presidency and State House operations remain dense with recurrent overheads, international and local travel, fuel, honoraria, refreshments, publicity, alongside recurring capital votes for vehicles, renovations, rehabilitation and facility management.
None of these items is illegal. That is precisely the problem. Over time, what should have attracted scrutiny has become routine. What should have been exceptional now feels embedded. The budget has normalised executive comfort as a fixed cost of governance.
From a constitutional perspective, this is troubling. Sections 14(2)(b) and 16 of the 1999 Constitution frame public expenditure around the welfare of the people and balanced national development. A budget that consistently protects administrative convenience while social sectors struggle for transformative investment may pass legal muster, but it sits uneasily with constitutional purpose.
A second pattern, also visible in the 2024 and 2025 budgets, is the steady erosion of the boundary between capital and recurrent expenditure. Across MDAs, "capital" line items increasingly include activities that look and behave like recurrent spending: routine monitoring and evaluation, software subscriptions, maintenance obligations, and repeated rehabilitations of the same facilities.
This is not a technical quibble. Capital expenditure is supposed to create durable public assets and future value. When it becomes a warehouse for routine consumption, capital budgeting loses its developmental meaning. Worse, it complicates value-for-money assessments and weakens audit clarity.
Equally concerning is the proliferation of "ongoing" projects. Many of these have appeared repeatedly over multiple budget cycles, without clear completion dates or post-completion evaluations. In sound public financial management systems, projects have life cycles. In Nigeria's budget architecture, many simply have memory.
Defenders of the budget will point to large allocations to education, health, humanitarian affairs, women and youth development. This defence was made in 2024 and 2025 as well. The difficulty is that headline figures mask structural weaknesses.
A significant share of social sector spending remains absorbed by personnel costs and administrative overheads. Capital investments capable of shifting outcomes, classroom rehabilitation at scale, primary healthcare access, nutrition, skills development linked to labour markets, are often fragmented and thinly spread.
The result is a persistent disconnect between budget size and lived experience. Citizens hear big numbers but see modest change. Over time, this erodes trust not just in budgets, but in governance itself.
One of the most consequential continuities from 2024 through 2026 is the dominance of debt service. Once again, it consumes a commanding share of the total envelope, effectively acting as a silent policy maker.
Legally, debt service is unavoidable. Politically and socially, its scale is revealing. It reflects years of optimistic borrowing, weak fiscal consolidation, and deferred structural reform. Each new budget now arrives partially pre-spent, with development squeezed into what remains.
This crowding-out effect is not neutral. It limits social ambition, constrains capital formation, and locks the state into a defensive fiscal posture, managing obligations rather than shaping outcomes.
Another persistent imbalance lies in the funding of accountability institutions. Bodies constitutionally charged with enforcing fiscal discipline, the Auditor-General, Fiscal Responsibility Commission, procurement and anti-corruption agencies, remain modestly funded relative to the scale and complexity of public expenditure.
This pattern featured in the 2024 and 2025 budgets and remains unresolved. The state expands spending discretion while under-investing in oversight capacity. From a rule-of-law perspective, this weakens both prevention and sanction. Accountability becomes aspirational rather than operational.
Budgets are also ethical texts. In a country grappling with inflation, unemployment, and service delivery stress, extensive allocations for honoraria, refreshments, welfare packages, repeated vehicle replacements and heavy travel send a message, whether intended or not.
Even where legally defensible, such signalling matters. Citizens are constantly urged to tighten belts, adjust expectations, and endure reforms. When the budget appears insulated from these realities, credibility suffers.
The most honest critique of the 2026 Appropriation Bill is not that it is reckless, but that it is cautious in the wrong places. Like its 2024 and 2025 predecessors, it manages power better than it builds prosperity. It is administratively confident but socially tentative; fiscally detailed but developmentally restrained.
The budget answers the question of how government will function. It remains less convincing on how society will advance.
Until Nigeria treats the budget as more than an accounting instrument, until it is deliberately aligned with measurable social outcomes, disciplined capital formation, and constitutional priorities, the country will continue to pass large budgets with small intentions. And the distance between government spending and citizen wellbeing will continue to grow.
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/
"Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation."
-- James D. Wolfensohn
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