Overlapping Budgets Deepen Nigeria’s Fiscal Accountability Crisis
By FIDELUS ZWANSON
A Budget That Refuses to Close
NIGERIA’S capital budgeting system is facing renewed scrutiny after the Federal Government extended the implementation period of the 2025 capital budget for the fourth time.
The latest extension moved the deadline from September 30 to December 31, 2026. President Bola Tinubu subsequently assented to the amendment after both chambers of the National Assembly approved it.
Consequently, the 2025 capital budget will remain active alongside the 2026 appropriation for most of the year.
That development has revived concerns about Nigeria’s long-running struggle to keep annual budgets within defined fiscal timelines.
Originally, the 2025 capital budget was expected to close on December 31, 2025. Lawmakers first moved the deadline to March 31, 2026, then to June 30 and later to September 30.
The latest extension therefore pushes implementation a full year beyond the original deadline.
The Government’s Case
Government officials have defended the extensions as a way to protect ongoing projects and prevent funds already appropriated from becoming unusable.
During the latest legislative consideration, lawmakers argued that economic pressures and implementation bottlenecks had slowed capital projects.
The Presidency also maintained that the additional time would enable ministries, departments and agencies to complete ongoing projects and deploy funds already appropriated.
Similarly, Senate Leader Opeyemi Bamidele said the extension would give agencies more time to implement projects for which funds had already been appropriated and released.
In practical terms, the argument is straightforward. Allowing a project nearing completion to lapse because of an administrative deadline could create another round of procurement, budgeting and funding complications.
However, that justification does not eliminate the accountability problem created when one budget remains open while another is already being implemented.
A Promise of One Budget Cycle
The latest extension also exposes a tension between policy ambition and implementation.
While presenting the 2026 budget in December 2025, President Tinubu pledged that Nigeria would move towards a single budget and revenue cycle.
He specifically promised an end to overlapping budgets, declaring that there would be “no overlaps, no excuses and no rollovers.”
Yet, the 2025 capital budget remains operational into 2026.
The contradiction does not necessarily mean that every extension represents financial mismanagement. Nevertheless, repeated extensions make it harder to demonstrate that the country has moved decisively towards a predictable annual budget cycle.
That matters because a budget is not merely an authorisation to spend. It is also a framework for planning, monitoring and measuring government performance.
The Execution Gap
Nigeria’s difficulty becomes clearer when the implementation figures are examined.
The 2025 Third Quarter Budget Implementation Report placed capital expenditure at about ₦3.1 trillion during the first nine months of the year, representing roughly 17.7 per cent of the projected ₦17.58 trillion capital budget.
That left a substantial gap between what government planned to spend and what had actually been implemented.
The Budget Office attributed the weak performance to factors including limited resources and the bottom-up cash-release process.
Meanwhile, the 2026 appropriation incorporated ₦5.71 trillion in outstanding unfunded capital obligations arising from the 2025 appropriation.
That rollover illustrates the scale of projects and obligations that can move from one fiscal framework into another.
When Accountability Becomes Blurred
For Abiodun Ogunniyi, Head of Research and Strategy at GTI, the central concern is traceability.
He argued that keeping budgets open across several fiscal periods makes it harder to establish a clear relationship between appropriations, releases, expenditure and physical project completion.
That problem can become more complicated when new projects compete for scarce resources with unfinished commitments from previous budgets.
Johnson Chukwu, Managing Director of Cowry Asset Management, similarly warned that overlapping appropriations can make it difficult to determine the implementation status of individual budgets.
He also raised concerns about distinguishing expenditure under different appropriation years and the possibility of duplicated spending.
From an accountability standpoint, therefore, the problem extends beyond the accounting period. It reaches into the ability of legislators, auditors, civil society organisations and citizens to determine what government approved, what it released, what it spent and what it actually delivered.
The Reporting Problem
Transparency becomes even more important when budget implementation reports arrive late.
Section 50 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act requires the Federal Government, through the Budget Office, to publish a summary of budget execution within 30 days after the end of each quarter.
Yet the first- and second-quarter 2025 implementation reports were published by the Budget Office on December 22, 2025, rather than within the statutory quarterly window.
The Budget Office’s current records show that quarterly implementation reports remain central to the official monitoring framework, while its stated mandate includes promoting transparency and accountability in public financial management.
Such delays weaken the ability of lawmakers and citizens to monitor expenditure while decisions are still being made.
By the time information becomes available, some spending decisions may already have become difficult to scrutinise or reverse.
The Cost of Repeated Rollovers
Dr Justin Amase, a development policy expert and Managing Director of Macrostrat Nigeria Limited, linked the recurring extensions to procurement delays, cash-release problems and weak implementation capacity.
He described the continued operation of overlapping budgets as a potential institutional crisis.
Professor Sheriffdeen Tella of Olabisi Onabanjo University also warned that repeated extensions could undermine confidence among contractors and businesses.
That concern has broader implications.
When government cannot consistently execute projects within approved fiscal periods, the annual budget becomes less reliable as a measure of what the state intends to accomplish within a given year.
Instead, projects can migrate from one appropriation to another, while their financial and physical status becomes increasingly difficult to follow.
The 2027 Question
The challenge now extends into the next budget cycle.
Nigeria must prepare the 2027 budget while substantial commitments from earlier appropriations remain under implementation.
That situation places additional pressure on the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper, which are designed to provide a forward-looking framework for government spending and fiscal policy.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act provides for the transmission of the MTEF to the National Assembly before the start of a new financial year, reinforcing the importance of timely budget preparation and legislative scrutiny.
Ultimately, extending a budget can preserve funding for projects that genuinely need additional time.
However, repeated extensions cannot, by themselves, solve procurement bottlenecks, delayed releases, weak monitoring or poor project management.
Nigeria’s deeper challenge is therefore not simply how long a budget remains open.
It is whether government can create a fiscal system in which appropriations are timely, releases are transparent, projects are measurable and public spending can be traced from approval to completion.
