#FixINEC #ElectoralReform #RigandDie2027 #TinubuIsAFailure
The 2025 Nigerian Federal Budget, grandly titled “The Restoration Budget: Securing Peace, Rebuilding Prosperity”, is, in reality, a grotesque showcase of fiscal recklessness, institutionalized theft, and the deep rot of patronage politics dressed up in the language of economic development.
It is a tragicomic script, where the actors are corrupt elites and political enablers, while the Nigerian people, the rightful audience of governance, are left in the dark, destitute, desperate, and dying.
Let us be unequivocally clear: this budget is not a plan for development. It is a carefully engineered mechanism for looting.
An Illegally Inflated Budget
From the onset, the process was marred by outright violations of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) of 2007. President Tinubu’s letter to the National Assembly to arbitrarily increase the budget by ₦4.5 trillion bypasses the requirement that all budget adjustments must be rooted in a legally binding Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF). The National Assembly then compounded the abuse by padding it further to ₦54.99 trillion, a ₦19.9 trillion increase from the 2024 budget without any accompanying macroeconomic or fiscal analysis. This is not budgeting; it is legalized economic sabotage.
The 2025 budget is the largest in Nigeria’s history, ₦54.99 trillion. But size is no substitute for sanity. As the BudgIT report explains, this budget:
- Violated the Fiscal Responsibility Act by bypassing the MTEF and increasing expenditure without macroeconomic justification.
- Breached the 3% GDP fiscal deficit limit by over ₦3 trillion, a direct legal violation.
- Relied on unrealistic oil production assumptions (2.06mbpd), even though the country struggles to produce 1.3mbpd.
- Was filled with uncoordinated, duplicated, and untraceable projects, many with no link to national development.
This budget is a technocrat’s nightmare and a looter’s fantasy.
Constituency Projects: The Slush Fund of Electoral Politics
Kalu Aja’s assessment of the 2025 budget rightly calls it a “complete mess,” and that is being generous. The budget is littered with vague and duplicative line items like “solar streetlights,” “empowerment grants,” and “classroom repairs.” Many of these “projects” are not only uncoordinated and untraceable, but are also duplicated across agencies, clear signals of ghost projects meant for private embezzlement.
For instance, the Ministry of Arts and Culture’s “renovation and furnishing of artist hostels” appears six times, same amount, same code. That is daylight robbery coded in bureaucratic language.
Worse still, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation’s office, intended for coordination, not execution, is transformed into a Santa Claus agency, distributing hundreds of millions in “honorariums,” “food items,” and even “royal father home furnishings.” This budget is not designed to serve the Nigerian public, it is crafted to buy loyalty and finance elections.
This is reinforced by a chilling confession from a political aide who confirms the budget is a war chest for 2027 elections. Lawmakers are told that failing to nominate “constituency projects” risks having funds redirected to their opponents.
Governance has been reduced to mafia logic: “Support the Don or be destroyed.“
Impact on Ordinary Nigerians: From Neglect to Despair
While the elite feast on ₦300 million cash grant allocations under the guise of empowerment, Nigeria’s inflation hovers above 30%, and food inflation ravages the working class. The same government allocating billions to invisible streetlights is unable to maintain basic supply chains for food, medicine, or electricity.
Education and healthcare are starved. Nigeria continues to fall behind on metrics like school enrollment, maternal mortality, and doctor to patient ratios, yet lawmakers are funding boreholes and “solar kiosks” that exist only on paper.
The failure to invest in core infrastructure like roads, power grids, refineries ensures continued economic underdevelopment. Even oil production targets are wishful thinking, given the sector’s structural decay, making revenue projections an economic fantasy rather than fiscal planning.
Tinubu’s Complicity: The Architect or the Accomplice?
President Tinubu cannot feign ignorance. The explosive growth in discretionary constituency allocations, the blatant violation of fiscal statutes, and the weaponization of public funds for electoral gains all occurred under his watch. His decision to increase the budget by ₦4.5 trillion via presidential fiat suggests active participation, not passive oversight. If he is not the architect of this heist, then he is certainly an enabler.
Moreover, the expectation that “tightening will happen after reelection” (per the political aide’s note) is both cynical and naïve. Nigeria has heard this song before. Promises of reform post-election are the lullabies of kleptocrats.
Besides, the promise that “he will tighten up after reelection” is insulting. Nigerians are being told they must endure looting until it is no longer politically convenient.
Budget Criminality and National Decline
The 2025 budget is not simply mismanaged, it is criminal. It diverts national wealth from roads to Rolls Royces, from clinics to campaign war rooms, from classrooms to constituency charades.
And the human cost is devastating:
- Children learn under trees while “classroom rehabilitation” is budgeted multiple times.
- Mothers die in childbirth while billions go to “food items” for unelected “royal fathers.”
- Farmers cannot access fertilizer while senators disburse ₦300m “grants” to invisible beneficiaries.
While billions are siphoned into phantom “empowerment” schemes, here is what Nigerians face:
- Over 60% of Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty.
- Inflation has destroyed household consumption. Prices of food and essential goods have doubled, yet the government spends more on “sitting allowances” than agriculture.
- Primary healthcare centers lack drugs, equipment, or even electricity, while “solar projects” are repeated across ministries with no audit trail.
- Education is decaying, students learn in dilapidated buildings while “classroom rehabilitation” is itemized multiple times for siphoning.
Every line of theft in this budget is a stolen future for millions.
The Anatomy of a Budget Crime
Nigeria’s 2025 budget is a catastrophic dereliction of public duty. It is the fiscal expression of a government that has chosen to enrich itself while presiding over mass poverty. If governance is a contract between the people and their leaders, then this budget is evidence that that contract has been torn, trampled, and spat upon.
There is no restoration here, only rot.
No rebuilding, only reallocation of stolen dreams.
The Nigerian people deserve better than this criminal cartel masquerading as a federal government.
If Nigeria is to survive, let alone prosper, this cycle of budget banditry must be shattered, not after elections, but now.
References:
- Kalu Aja on X
- BudgIT (https://budgit.org/)
- Budget Office of the Federation, Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning (https://budgetoffice.gov.ng/)
