For the third year running, Nigeria’s National Assembly has once again shifted the goalposts of the country’s budget process in the middle of play, deepening concerns about legislative discipline, fiscal credibility and the erosion of hard-won budgetary reforms.
What was once a predictable, if imperfect, January to December budget cycle has gradually become a moving target, reshaped midstream by political convenience, electoral ambitions and institutional laxity.
The result is a budget process that no longer runs on a clear calendar, but on ad hoc adjustments that undermine planning, oversight and implementation.
At the centre of this drift is the disruption of the budget defence process, arguably the most critical phase of legislative scrutiny where Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) justify their spending proposals before lawmakers.
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Traditionally, budget defence at the National Assembly followed a fairly structured pattern. Under earlier legislative cycles and most notably during the later years of the late Muhammadu Buhari administration, budget presentations were concluded early enough for MDAs to defend their estimates before the end of the year.
Committees typically devoted four to six weeks to the exercise, allowing for detailed interrogation, back-and-forth clarifications and revisions.
By the time lawmakers went on Christmas recess, much of the heavy lifting had been done. Reports were finalised shortly after resumption in January, paving the way for passage and assent that aligned with a January to December fiscal year.
That order has steadily collapsed.
In recent years, the budget calendar has been repeatedly altered midstream, often without formal acknowledgment. The budgets from the executive arrive late or are revised after submission.
Committees struggle to fix defence schedules. And rather than correcting the slippages, the legislature has increasingly adapted by bending its own processes.
One of the most striking changes has been the relocation of budget defence into the middle of lawmakers’ January recess.
Instead of concluding budget defence before the end of the year, committees now summon MDAs during the National Assembly’s recess, an arrangement that blurs the line between legislative duty and institutional improvisation.
MDAs are asked to appear in Abuja while lawmakers are technically on break. Defence sessions are compressed into unusually tight timelines, sometimes running late into the evening. What should be a deliberate, forensic process is turned into a rushed box-ticking exercise.
By the time lawmakers formally resume plenary, committees are expected to “package” their reports almost immediately, often within days, leaving little room for reflection, reconciliation of figures, or cross-committee consistency.
This rushed process contrasts sharply with earlier practices, when budget defence alone took over a month and allowed lawmakers to interrogate not just numbers, but policy assumptions, project locations and implementation capacity.
This year’s disruption has been even more pronounced.
Despite attempts to stick to an early budget timeline, the National Assembly has once again missed the cycle. The budget defense by MDAs won’t even be done in January, as it was done in previous years. So, the 2026 budget defense will likely commence fully in February, following the January 26 resumption of the lawmakers.
Multiple factors are at play. Chief among them is electioneering. Solomon Adeola, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, is currently seeking the governorship ticket in Ogun State, while several other key lawmakers are deeply involved in political calculations ahead of 2027.
There is also the unresolved burden of poor implementation.
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By lawmakers’ own admission, as much as 70 percent of the 2025 budget has not been fully implemented. Capital releases have lagged. Projects remain unexecuted.
Yet the system has rolled forward into another budget cycle without first accounting for the failures of the last.
This pattern raises a fundamental question: how does a legislature effectively scrutinise new spending proposals when old ones remain largely unaccounted for?
Equally troubling is the repeated failure to perfect and enforce budget circulars, the formal instruments that define timelines, expectations and procedures for budget preparation.
For the third consecutive year, circulars have either arrived late, been adjusted mid-process, or ignored altogether. Rather than insisting on compliance, the National Assembly has adapted itself to the chaos, normalising deviations that should have triggered institutional pushback.
This is a stark departure from the Buhari-era reforms that restored the January–December cycle “almost effortlessly,” as many budget analysts recall. Whatever one thinks of that administration’s broader economic record, its budget calendar was largely respected, proof that discipline was possible when both arms of government aligned around process.
The implications go beyond missed dates.
A compressed budget defence weakens oversight.
When MDAs know they have only a few hours, or at most a day before a committee, accountability becomes performative rather than substantive. Line items are waved through.
Recurrent spending escapes scrutiny. Capital allocations are recycled year after year, even when projects have stalled.
For a country grappling with ballooning deficits, rising debt service costs and declining fiscal space, this erosion of oversight is not a procedural flaw, it is a structural risk.
Worse still, the National Assembly’s willingness to keep adjusting its own benchmarks mid-cycle sends the wrong signal to the executive: that deadlines are negotiable, and rules are flexible.
This is no longer an isolated lapse. It is a pattern.
Three years of missed cycles, rushed defences and shifting timelines suggest an institutional complacency that should worry even the most optimistic observers of Nigeria’s fiscal governance.
If the legislature cannot hold the line on its own calendar, it weakens its moral authority to demand discipline from MDAs, enforce implementation benchmarks, or interrogate borrowing plans tied to annual budgets.
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Restoring credibility will require more than rhetoric. It demands a firm recommitment to a January to December cycle, early submission of budget estimates, properly sequenced defence sessions, and a refusal to normalise midstream adjustments, no matter how politically inconvenient.
Until then, Nigeria’s budget process will continue to resemble a match where the goalposts keep moving mid-March, leaving planners, investors, and citizens unsure of the rules of play.
And in a fragile economy, uncertainty is a cost the country can no longer afford.
