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TINUBU SIGNS N68.32 TRILLION 2026 BUDGET INTO LAW — BUT NIGERIANS ARE STILL WAITING FOR 2025 TO WORK
President Bola Tinubu has signed the 2026 Appropriation Act into law, putting Nigeria’s biggest budget ever — N68.32 trillion — into effect. At the same time, implementation of the 2025 budget has been extended to the end of June 2026, a tacit admission that the outgoing fiscal year failed to deliver on its targets before the deadline.
The 2026 budget is a staggering figure. It is a number that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, and in a country where budgets routinely underperform, the size of the appropriation is only as meaningful as the government’s ability to spend it right. Nigeria has a long and painful history of padding, duplication, and outright theft embedded inside appropriation bills — and no administration has truly broken that cycle.
The extension of the 2025 budget implementation to June 2026 is the part of this story that deserves the most scrutiny. It means that capital projects and allocations approved for the 2025 fiscal year were not executed within the year they were budgeted. This is not a minor administrative adjustment. It is a formal acknowledgment that the federal government could not spend money that was already approved and allocated — a failure of planning, procurement, and execution at the highest level.
Nigerians who depend on infrastructure projects, health interventions, and social spending funded through the annual budget will feel that failure most directly. Roads that should have been awarded, clinics that should have received equipment, and schools that should have been renovated are still waiting — not because money was not budgeted, but because the machinery of government could not convert appropriations into action.
The Tinubu administration has repeatedly leaned on budget size as a signal of ambition. The jump to N68.32 trillion is being presented as bold governance. But ambition without execution is just arithmetic. The real test of any budget is not what is signed on paper — it is how much of it actually reaches the people, and how fast.
With Nigeria’s debt service obligations consuming a disproportionate share of revenue, the question hanging over the 2026 budget is not just whether it will be implemented. The question is how much of it, after servicing loans and paying salaries, will be left to do anything transformative at all.
Signing a budget into law is the easy part. The hard part is the part this government has consistently struggled with. And extending last year’s budget into the middle of this year is proof that the struggle is real.
