Our Reporter, Abuja
A Nigerian governance expert and former Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms, Dr Joe Abah, has criticised the Federal Government’s decision to roll over the 2024 capital budget into 2026, describing it as evidence of poor planning and unrealistic revenue projections.
In a post on his X handle on Tuesday, Abah said the move amounted to an admission that federal budgeting had become “farcical,” warning that years of progress in Nigeria’s budgeting system were being reversed.
“After many years of consistent improvements in the budgeting system, the federal government has, quite sadly, regressed in its budget practices. Carrying forward the 2024 capital budget into 2026 is an admission that federal budgets are farcical,” he wrote.
Abah argued that the problem stemmed largely from revenue targets that far exceed actual collections, noting that capital budgets become meaningless when based on unrealistic assumptions. According to him, all 36 states of the federation now manage their budgets better than the Federal Government.
“When your revenue budget is unrealistic, your capital budget is just empty rhetoric,” he said, recalling concerns previously raised by the Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service that the government was attempting to use one year’s revenue to fund budgets spanning several years.
To illustrate his point, Abah likened the situation to “trying to use your one-year salary to live large for three years,” adding that such an approach inevitably leads to repeated deferrals of capital projects due to lack of funds.
Quoting Austrian economist Rudolf Goldscheid, Abah said, “The budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies,” concluding that the facts surrounding Nigeria’s budget implementation “speak for themselves.”
