Nigeria’s fiscal calendar has entered a strange twilight zone. Open the news on any given day, and you are likely to find civil society groups, economists, and data journalists up in arms over delayed budget implementation reports.When the Budget Office of the Federation recently scrambled to address the backlogs, its defence was telling.The Director-General, Tanimu Yakubu, explained that a fiscal year is not a fixed chronological concept but a legal creation. Because the 2025 Appropriation Act was repealed, re-enacted, and extended to June 2026, the traditional January-to-December calendar was effectively discarded.
To the untrained eye, this sounds like standard administrative friction. To those tracking public funds, it is a transparent cover for a deeper crisis. However, blaming the executive branch for this transparency blackout misses the root of the problem. The executive can only exploit loopholes that have been deliberately carved out for them. The true architect of Nigeria’s current budget mess is the institution constitutionally mandated to prevent it: the National Assembly.
Under Sections 80 and 81 of the 1999 Constitution, the National Assembly holds the power of the purse. It is supposed to act as a strict gatekeeper, ensuring that the executive spends public money wisely, transparently, and within the limits of the law.
Instead, the legislature has developed a habit of rubber-stamping rolling extensions. Over the last few fiscal cycles, we have witnessed an unprecedented legislative trend where the lifespan of capital budgets is stretched repeatedly. The 2023 budget was dragged into late 2024. The 2024 budget implementation window was shifted multiple times. Now, the 2025 budget has been extended well into 2026.
By constantly moving the goalposts, lawmakers are not solving procurement bottlenecks. They are creating a chaotic environment of overlapping budgets. At any given moment, ministries, departments, and agencies are spending money from different fiscal years simultaneously. This makes comprehensive accounting nearly impossible and provides the perfect excuse for delayed reporting.
The real danger of these legislative extensions is how they undermine existing statutory safeguards, most notably the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) of 2007.
The FRA was enacted to protect the country from arbitrary fiscal behaviour. Section 50 of the Act is explicit: the Budget Office must publish a summarised report on budget execution within 30 days after the end of each quarter. There is no clause stating that this rule is suspended if a budget is extended.
When the National Assembly legalises these extensions, it gives the executive the perfect legal shield to bypass the FRA. The Budget Office can argue that because the fiscal year is legally ongoing, data reconciliation across hundreds of agencies must stretch out as well.
As a result, quarterly performance reports that should provide a real-time health check on the economy are delayed by six months or more. By the time the public sees where the money went, the political landscape has shifted, the funds are spent, and accountability becomes retroactive.
When the National Assembly chooses political accommodation over fiscal discipline, the consequences are felt directly by citizens. For civic tech platforms and accountability organisations monitoring government promises, overlapping budgets act as a smoke screen. It becomes incredibly difficult to verify whether a newly renovated primary health centre or a rural road was funded by the 2024 allocation, the 2025 main budget, or a supplementary bill.
When multiple budgets run concurrently, cash management becomes inefficient. Monies are pooled into competing priorities, project completion rates drop, and the risk of abandoned projects skyrockets. By approving these extensions, the National Assembly weakens its own committees. Parliamentary reviews by the Public Accounts Committees already operate years behind schedule. Adding structural chaos to chronological delay means that lawmakers are effectively blind to real-time executive spending.
Nigeria cannot build a stable, predictable economy on a budget cycle that changes at the whim of political convenience. A few years ago, a significant effort was made to return the country to a predictable January-to-December fiscal cycle. The current leadership of the National Assembly has completely undone that progress.
If the legislature wants to clear its name and show true thought leadership, it must stop treating budget timelines as flexible suggestions. It needs to enforce the strict boundaries of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, refuse arbitrary extension requests from the executive, and demand that data reconciliation happen concurrently with expenditure.
Accountability cannot be paused for administrative convenience. Until the National Assembly stops providing the legal cover for these delays, it remains a partner in the systemic collapse of Nigeria's fiscal transparency.
