Who Is Watching the Budget?
Advocacy Series
Somewhere in your local government area, there is a project that exists on paper. It has a name. It has an allocation. It may even have a commissioning date buried in a government document. And there is a reasonable chance that if you go looking for it on the ground, you will find nothing. No road. No borehole. No health centre. Just land that does not know it was budgeted for.
This is not a new Nigerian story. But what is new is that we now have the numbers to tell it with uncomfortable precision.
Nigeria’s 2025 budget of N54.99 trillion was hailed as the largest in the country’s history. Yet capital execution stood at only 26 percent in early 2025, with 70 percent of projects rolled over. The consequences are visible everywhere: stalled infrastructure, rising living costs, and shrinking opportunities that trap millions in poverty. To understand what that means in plain terms, the government planned to build things, collected the mandate to spend public money on those things, and then did not build most of them. Roads crumble, power supply remains unreliable, and healthcare is inadequate as capital projects lag behind, leaving communities isolated and vulnerable.
BudgIT found that the National Assembly inserted thousands of projects worth N6.9 trillion into the 2025 budget without adequate justification or alignment with national development goals. Insertions into Nigeria’s budget trigger massive deficits, squeezing out funds meant for priority capital spending. In this environment, corruption thrives as resources are diverted to unviable constituency projects while critical infrastructure is abandoned, and public trust erodes. These are not figures invented by opposition politicians. They are the findings of a credible, independent organisation doing the work that government oversight institutions should be doing.
Then there is the local government story and it is the one that should concern every Nigerian living outside the major cities most directly.
On July 11, 2024, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark judgment declaring it unconstitutional for state governments to retain or manage funds meant for local councils, ordering that allocations from the Federation Account be paid directly to local governments as provided under Section 162 of the Constitution. The ruling was celebrated as a historic shift toward restoring the third tier of government and strengthening grassroots democracy. However, a full year after that ruling, funds continued to pass through state governments amid disputes between the Central Bank, state and local government authorities, and other relevant agencies. Analysis showed that 36 state governors received N4.5 trillion in local government allocations in that period.
President Tinubu himself stepped in publicly, telling governors directly at the APC National Executive Committee meeting in December 2025: “The Supreme Court has said, give them their money directly. If you wait for my Executive Order, because I have the knife, I have the yam, I will cut it.” He went further, urging the media to extend its scrutiny to states and local governments, saying: “We’ve opened up the principle of federalism to the extent that local governments are now getting their money. But how they use it is in your hands.”
These are the right words. The question that communities across Nigeria are asking is when the right action will follow.
This gap between a Supreme Court ruling, a presidential directive, and actual delivery at the community level is precisely why citizen-led budget accountability is not a civic luxury. It is a practical necessity for the communities most likely to bear the cost of that gap. Formal oversight has not closed it. Nigeria’s budgeting problem stems from weak discipline, overly optimistic planning, and limited accountability. Unless these root issues are tackled, budgets will continue to look impressive on paper but fail in practice.
The model for community accountability already exists and is already working. BudgIT deploys field investigators across 33 states to track whether government projects are actually being built versus what was claimed. That model produces evidence. It makes governments uncomfortable in exactly the way accountability is supposed to. What is required to scale is not technology. It is an organised, persistent human presence in communities prepared to ask questions and refuse to accept silence as an answer.
ST Tamandu Marine Patrol believes accountability begins where people live. Not in Abuja. Not in committee rooms. On the street where your road ends. At the location where a borehole was promised, it never arrived. The school that received a budget line for renovation is still waiting. The communities we serve in Lagos deserve to know what was allocated to them, what was actually spent, and who is responsible for the difference. We intend to make that knowledge available and to support the kind of organised citizen oversight that turns knowledge into action.
The budget is public money. Public money belongs to the public. And the public is long overdue to start acting like it.
