From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja
Economic analysts say Nigeria is facing unprecedented budget confusion as the Federal Government implements three different spending plans at the same time; the 2024 budget, a 2024 supplementary budget and the 2025 budget.
While the government calls it continuity, experts and legal practitioners describe it as fiscal disorder.
At the centre of the storm is the decision by the National Assembly to extend the lifespan of the 2024 budget until December 2025, long after the 2025 budget was signed into law. Critics say the practice undermines the constitution, weakens accountability and makes it impossible to track real budget performance.
“The financial year is between January and December in line with the constitution. If the National Assembly wants another framework, they must amend the law, not shift dates arbitrarily,” said Lead Director of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Eze Onyekpere. He continued: “A financial year is 12 months. Everybody understands this. Even the Appropriation Act says you must not expend money after December 31. What is happening now is unconstitutional.” For him, the implications are vivid. Capital projects, the schools, roads, hospitals and power facilities that Nigerians desperately need, are being delayed or reprioritised while recurrent expenditure like salaries and debt servicing take priority.
“The government has even directed MDAs to categorise their 2025 projects into urgent, less urgent and deferrable. That shows the confusion. At the end, Nigerians may not feel the impact of either the 2024 or 2025 budgets,” he warned.
Also commenting, a budget analyst and economist, Sanya Adejokun, called the development “an aberration.”
He explained: “A budget is supposed to run for one year. If there’s a need, you introduce a supplementary budget, but still within that year. Now, we have three budgets running side by side. Even civil servants in the Budget Office find it difficult to say which one is being implemented.”
According to him, the overlap is particularly troubling for transparency. “If you check the Budget Office website today, you won’t find clarity. Is it 2024? The supplementary? Or 2025? Nobody can give a straight answer. The capital component of 2025 is only now beginning to run. But in terms of implementation levels, there is no credible figure.”
Yet, Adejokun suggested the arrangement might help projects continue without unnecessary stoppages.
“Rather than asking contractors to stop work and return unspent funds at the end of December, the government now lets projects continue into the new year. That keeps contractors on site, prevents waste and ensures projects don’t drag endlessly. Legally, it’s wrong. Economically, it may save time and money,” he said.
Debt remains another major driver of the budget crisis. Both the 2024 and 2025 budgets have more than 70 per cent of revenues earmarked for debt servicing. By mid-2025, reports indicated allocations for debt repayment were already exhausted.
“Even in 2025, the money budgeted for debt has been exhausted. Salaries are being paid, but capital expenditure is reprioritised. This is happening at a time the president announced that revenue projections had been exceeded. The contradiction shows the level of dysfunction,” Onyekpere noted.
Currency depreciation has made matters worse. “If the government owed N10 when naira was N500 to $1, that debt is now triple with naira at N1,530. In dollar terms, DMO says total debt has fallen from $127 billion to $97 billion. But in naira terms, it looks catastrophic. That fuels panic,” Adejokun explained.
Nigeria’s budget system has been troubled for years. Since 1999, the country has never achieved 75 percent capital budget implementation. Zero-based budgeting under former President Buhari failed to improve efficiency, while digital monitoring systems could not close the gap between budget promises and delivery.
The constitution, under Section 318, clearly defines the financial year as January 1 to December 31 unless otherwise prescribed by the National Assembly. Onyekpere argues that this provision does not give lawmakers licence to arbitrarily extend budgets, but only to adopt a new framework through a formal amendment. “If they want April–March, let them legislate it. If they want July–June, let them legislate it. But extending the 2024 budget into December 2025 without amendment is unconstitutional. The judiciary has also failed by refusing to entertain public interest suits on the matter,” he said.
Supporters of the extension say it ensures continuity of projects and avoids the bureaucratic hassle of re-procurement or refunding unspent allocations. But critics believe the practice deepens opacity and fuels corruption. With three budgets active at the same time, monitoring has become impossible. Implementation reports are delayed or incomplete, and ministries exploit the confusion to duplicate projects or inflate claims.
By December 2025, both the 2024 and 2025 budgets will still technically be in operation. That leaves a troubling question: how can Nigerians measure which budget is being implemented, or judge the success of either?
The stakes are high. Budgets are supposed to be instruments of accountability and development, not shifting puzzles. Yet Nigeria’s fiscal landscape is now a fog of overlapping laws, timelines, and documents. For a country struggling with poverty, unemployment, and infrastructure gaps, the lack of budget clarity is more than technical; it is existential.
As Onyekpere warned: “Budgeting is law. A financial year is law. When you bend the rules, you break accountability. And when accountability breaks, development dies.”
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