It will evaluate whether the government’s promise of a lone budget and revenue cycle can at endure travel from policy announcement to sustained procedure. We can do that by the act.
When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared in December 2025 that Nigeria would no longer run several budgets on the same earnings inflow, he appeared to be drawing a line under one of the country’s longest-running fiscal problems.
“We are terminating the habit of running three budgets in one inflow,” Tinubu said whilst presenting the 2026 Appropriation Bill.
“By March 31, 2026, all assets liabilities from former years will be fully funded and closed. From April, Nigeria will operate on a individual budget backed by a lone sales cycle-no overlaps, no excuses, no rollovers.”
Nine months later, that timetable has been overtaken by events.
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On September 30, 2026, the President assented to the Appropriation (Amendment) (No.4) Bill, 2025, extending the implementation of the 2025 budget from September 30 to December 31, 2026.
The Presidency said the extension would supply Ministries, Departments and Agencies greater time to entire current money projects and guarantee that resources already appropriated were fully utilised.
The explanation addresses the immediate ground for the extension, but it additionally exposes the difficulty of reconciling the most recent decision alongside the fiscal reset announced by the President smaller than a year ago.
The 2025 budget is now established to stay functioning up to the time that the finish of December 2026.
The implications of this is that the appropriation will run well beyond the March 31 deadline Tinubu had group for closing preceding-year capital liabilities and the April 2026 date he had identified for the beginning of a individual budget and proceeds cycle.
The newest extension is furthermore not the primary adjustment to the 2025 budget timeline.
Earlier in 2026, the implementation period of the assets section of the 2025 Appropriation Act was longer beyond its novel deadline, together with the government citing the contact for to finished important infrastructure and engaged projects.
The current amendment has now pushed the deadline to December 31.
The development is fundamental.
The administration had itself identified overlapping appropriations as a difficulty requiring an exceptional fiscal reset.
In his December 2025 budget speech, Tinubu said countless budgets, abandoned projects, inherited obligations and perpetual rollovers had undermined governance and economic planning.
His proposed remedy was not merely to upgrade the execution of available budgets but to terminate the approach altogether.
But Nigeria’s struggle using budget-cycle discipline predates the Tinubu administration.
The challenge has stretched across consecutive civilian administrations as 1999, although its make and severity have varied.
Under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the government introduced large audience financial oversight reforms, including the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, in an attempt to upgrade fiscal planning and decreased the vulnerability of annual budgets to fluctuations in oil earnings.
Yet the transition to a predictable annual budget cycle remained difficult.
Under the delayed President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the 2008 budget was not enacted pending April 14, whereas the 2009 and 2010 budgets were signed in March and April respectively.
The delays continued under President Goodluck Jonathan.
The 2011 budget was enacted on May 27, 2011; the 2012 budget on April 13, 2012; the 2013 appropriation on February 26, 2013; the 2014 budget on May 24; and the 2015 budget on May 19.
The influence was that considerable portions of assorted fiscal years elapsed in advance of modern appropriations became law.
The delays were regularly accompanied by disputes in the middle of the Executive and the Statewide Assembly over who was responsible.
In 2019, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, blamed overdue submission of budget proposals by the Executive for delays under the Buhari administration.
The then Senate President, Bukola Saraki, had earlier pointed to delays by Ministries, Departments and Agencies in defending their budget proposals.
The World Bank subsequently found that federal budgets were enacted an mean of five months behind in the middle of 2015 and 2019, reflecting a wider pattern of limited budget predictability.
There was, nonetheless, a important improvement from 2020.
The 2020 budget was enacted earlier than the initiate of the fiscal year, during the time that the 2021 budget was signed on December 31, 2020.
The Buhari administration described the development as a result to the January-to-December budget cycle.
But even that improvement was not absolute.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the implementation of the 2020 budget, prompting the Federal Government to broaden its assets element into 2021.
The government cited the lockdown, procurement delays and difficulties faced by MDAs in implementing projects.
That past is decisive.
It shows that Nigeria’s budget difficulty has never been solely around the absence of political promises.
Consecutive administrations have attempted reforms, but the framework has repeatedly been pulled fund by delays in preparation and passage, sales shortfalls, procurement challenges, project-readiness problems and weak implementation capacity.
The Tinubu administration inherited that difficult background but made ending overlapping budgets one of its extra explicit fiscal commitments.
By 2024 and 2025, the government was again operating alongside overlapping appropriations and extensions.
It was against that chronology that Tinubu made his December 2025 proclamation that the era of “three budgets in one inflow” would finish.
The President’s declaration raised expectations that 2026 would grade a decisive break including the prior pattern.
Instead, the government has now longer the 2025 budget to the conclude of the year.
For economists and financial analysts, the topic goes beyond whether such an extension is legally permissible.
Dr Muda Yusuf, Director Executive Officer of the Centre for the Promotion of Personal Enterprise, has repeatedly linked Nigeria’s budget implementation difficulties to the credibility of its proceeds and expenditure projections.
Yusuf has warned that repeated budget rollovers generate uncertainty as businesses and contractors cannot reliably resolve when government-funded projects will actually acquire funding.
He has furthermore identified the gap amid government projections and existing salary results as a foundational challenge to budget credibility.
Other analysts have raised concerns around the administrative consequences of running overlapping appropriations.
Dr Muhammad-Bashir Yusuf, an economist at Al-Hikmah University, Ilọrin explained to Daily Trust in a telephone chat on Friday that the January-to-December fiscal cycle was crucial as it provided a definite starting and ending proposal for government planning, spending and economic measurement.
According to him, a budget essentially sets out how the government intends to increase and invest cash in a given period, adding that the proposals remain concern to the availability of capital.
As a consequence, he said their implementation depends on the government’s capacity to finance them.
He, yet, cautioned against abruptly truncating the present overlapping budget sequence in an bid to restore the January-to-December cycle, saying such a shift could disrupt projects and other programmes already captured in in progress appropriations.
“The truth still remains that it is not difficult to accomplish it. So it’s furthermore not helpful for us”, he said.
The Federal Government, yet, has maintained that extensions are designed to safeguard community resources already appropriated and prevent projects from being abandoned easily owing to the detail that the implementation deadline has expired.
That argument has individual force where projects have already commenced and the government has made financial commitments to contractors.
The September 30 allege from the Presidency was explicit on that aspect, saying the current extension would guarantee that capital already appropriated were fully put to effort free from disrupting essential programmes.
The most recent decision is therefore not necessarily evidence that the government has abandoned its intention of a predictable budget cycle.
But it does mean that the correct timetable announced by Tinubu in December 2025 has not been achieved.
The President had promised that prior resources liabilities would be closed by March 31 and that from April Nigeria would operate on a individual budget backed by a one sales cycle.
Instead, an earlier budget remains alive pending December.
The episode hence illustrates the tension at the heart of Nigeria’s audience support framework.
For greater than two decades, following administrations have confronted versions of the same topic.
The up-to-date extension suggests that the challenge remains unresolved.
The December 31, 2026 deadline has consequently become additional than another administrative date. That is the easiest route to outcome it assist from January to December,” he said.
He argued that the further practical technique was to recognise that the overlapping cycle did not start alongside the present administration and should accordingly be addressed throughout a transition that would not undermine projects already approved and awaiting implementation.
“Whatever is not possible, we should have recognized by now,” he said, stressing that it would be unrealistic to await a government to compress a comprehensive year’s budget implementation into solely a few months.
He furthermore dismissed the proposal of merely transferring an entire year’s budget into the following year and renaming it, saying such an manner would leave unresolved questions around the fiscal year that had effectively been cancelled.
According to him, restoring the January-to-December cycle would yet stay essential as economic indicators such as the Gross Domestic Goods (GDP) are measured against defined periods.
“We should discover a method of normalising it, and this is extremely key.
“When we talk concerning our GDP, we talk concerning a individual year, not over a period of additional than a year. Just mention, okay, we truncate all other budgets and we’ll be starting from January to December,” he said.
But he noted that such an strategy would mean sacrificing developments already captured in the present budget, notably if the government merely cancelled an whole fiscal year to build room for a original January-to-December cycle.
Alongside the working scenario as an illustration, he said the extension of the 2025 budget into 2026 meant that merely starting another filled budget cycle in January 2027 would develop another gap that would have to be resolved.
“Except to tell we desire to cancel the fiscal year, so there won’t be any budget for 2026, then we now initiate including 2027.
Source: FLASHBACK: In December, Tinubu vowed to terminate rollover of budgets
