Our budgets are broken: The annual ritual of deceit in Nigeria’s states

Every year, Nigerians are subjected to a familiar performance. Governors file into state assemblies with glossy documents, christen them with dramatic titles, and announce “record-breaking” budgets. Lawmakers applaud, press statements are issued, and citizens are told that development is on the way. By the end of the year, little has changed. Hospitals still lack drugs, classrooms are overcrowded, rural roads remain impassable, and insecurity deepens. The cycle repeats without shame. What we call budgeting in Nigeria has become ritualistic theatre, divorced from accountability and utterly indifferent to the suffering of citizens.

This was not how Nigeria’s constitutional architecture intended budgeting to work. The budget process at all three tiers of government was deliberately designed as a democratic instrument of participation, oversight and accountability. At the federal level, the President prepares and presents the Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly, where elected representatives debate, amend and approve it in the open. The same constitutional logic applies at the state level, where governors are expected to present their budgets to Houses of Assembly, and at the local government level, where chairmen are meant to present budgets to councils, with councillors representing wards as the legislative arm. This three-tier design was meant to entrench participation, deepen accountability, and guarantee that democracy delivers development at every level of governance.

In practice, however, this elegant constitutional architecture has been hollowed out below the federal tier. While the federal budget process—imperfect as it is—still features public hearings, media scrutiny, committee oversight and occasional legislative pushback, state and local government budgeting has degenerated into executive monologue. Governors dominate the process almost absolutely. Budgets arrive at state assemblies as finished products, not proposals. Lawmakers often lack the technical capacity to interrogate figures, and political dependency on governors ensures docility. At the local government level, councillors are frequently sidelined entirely, with budgets prepared and executed by chairmen under the watchful control of state governors through joint account mechanisms. What was designed as participatory democracy has become a caricature of accountability.

The 2026 budget cycle once again exposes the deeper deceit embedded in this dysfunction. In real monetary terms, and excluding Internally Generated Revenue and intervention funds, about 47.3 per cent of all Federation Account revenue will flow to states and local governments combined, while the Federal Government takes roughly 52.7 per cent. This translates into trillions of naira under the control of subnational governments in 2026 alone. Yet Nigerians are conditioned to believe that only Abuja has resources. The evidence of daily hardship across the states suggests otherwise. The problem is not simply lack of money; it is the absence of accountable processes to translate public funds into public goods.

Recent policy action by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, through Executive Order 9 of 2026 directing that royalty oil, tax oil, profit oil and gas entitlements under production sharing and related contracts be paid directly into the Federation Account, highlights how leakages and structural distortions have long weakened what accrues to the three tiers of government. By ending duplicative deductions and opaque retention structures within NNPC Limited, the federal government is attempting to plug a major bottleneck in national revenue flows. This intervention, if faithfully implemented, means more money should reach federal, state and local governments. But it also raises an uncomfortable question: will more money flowing into the same broken systems translate into better outcomes for citizens, or merely expand the pool of resources available for elite mismanagement?

The danger is that without reforms in budgeting culture and accountability, these changes will simply shift beneficiaries from one set of opaque institutions to another. For years, leakages in the oil and gas revenue chain have been widely suspected as slush funds used at the discretion of powerful actors, including allegations—often difficult to prove—of diversion for political and electoral purposes. Correcting those distortions is necessary, but not sufficient. If the additional revenues now entering the Federation Account are absorbed into the same ritual of unaccountable budgeting at state and local levels, the reform will change accounting entries without changing lived realities. Government must now be accountable down to its last tier, precisely because more money is coming into the system.

This failure is compounded by budgets that show little relationship to population pressures and social needs. States with vast populations, rapid urbanisation and massive youth unemployment routinely allocate less per capita to primary healthcare, basic education and water than smaller, less burdened states. Recurrent expenditure continues to grow—more political appointees, bloated government houses, protocol votes and convoys—while human development indicators stagnate. These patterns betray a governing class more concerned with self-preservation than social outcomes.

The abuse of security votes deepens this distortion. Billions are allocated annually under vague “security” headings, often with no legislative scrutiny or independent audit. In some states, these votes are barely visible in budget documents at all. Yet insecurity persists, communities are displaced and rural livelihoods collapse. Security votes have become a convenient black hole into which public funds disappear without trace or measurable impact.

The structural suffocation of local governments completes the circle of failure. Funds meant for grassroots development are routinely captured at state level through joint accounts, leaving councils financially incapacitated. Councillors, constitutionally meant to serve as the legislative check closest to the people, are rendered irrelevant. The result is predictable: rural Nigeria is abandoned, and citizens experience governance as absence rather than presence.

Equally damaging is the absence of monitoring and evaluation. Budgets are announced with flourish, but there is no systematic, public tracking of outcomes. Projects appear in documents but vanish on the ground. Without transparent performance reporting, failure carries no political cost. The executive wastes, the legislature looks away, and citizens are left with promises instead of results.

What Nigerians witness each budget season is therefore not governance but choreography. Large numbers mask empty priorities. Lawmakers perform approval without scrutiny. Citizens are spectators to decisions taken in their name but not in their interest. The tragedy is that a constitutional framework designed to guarantee accountability and development has been reduced to a ritual of mutual convenience between executives and legislatures at the subnational level.

Ultimately, reclaiming Nigeria’s budget process will require more than annual speeches and ceremonial approvals; it demands continuous, public accountability. Waiting until the end of the fiscal year to “assess performance” is an invitation to damage control after the damage has already been done. Budgets should not be monitored retrospectively; they must be monitored in real time. There should be mandatory monthly stakeholder review meetings at the federal, state and local government levels, bringing together legislators, civil society, professional bodies, community representatives, the media and relevant ministries to track implementation against clear milestones. Such forums would force early questions to be asked, deviations to be challenged, and reckless spending to be halted before it becomes irreversible loss. Continuous monitoring is the difference between governance and gambling with public funds. If this culture of monthly scrutiny does not take root, then even well-intentioned reforms that increase the money available to the three tiers of government will merely expand the scale of mismanagement. Nigerians do not need bigger budgets in name; they need disciplined, transparent budgeting in practice. Until real-time monitoring becomes routine at all tiers of government, our annual budget ritual will remain a carefully choreographed deception—where failure is only discovered after it has already been paid for by citizens.

Hussaini resides in Jos

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