10th N’Assembly: Turning Repeated Budget Extension into Norm

For the fourth time, the National Assembly has extended the 2025 capital budget implementation, raising questions about fiscal planning, execution bottlenecks and whether repeated extensions are becoming Nigeria’s new budgetary norm. Sunday Aborisade reports.

When a legislature extends the lifespan of a budget once, the decision may be understood as an administrative response to unforeseen circumstances. When it happens repeatedly, however, it becomes a question of policy, planning and institutional capacity.

That is the dilemma confronting Nigeria following the Senate’s decision to extend, for the fourth time, the implementation period of the capital component of the 2025 Appropriations Act from September 30 to December 31, 2026.

The extension, approved through an amendment to the Appropriations Repeal and Enactment Act 2025, was defended as necessary to prevent the abandonment of ongoing projects and ensure that appropriated and released funds are properly utilised.

On the surface, the argument is compelling.

Why should the government terminate projects that are already substantially completed merely because the legal window for spending the relevant appropriation has expired? Why should contractors who have executed substantial portions of their contracts be left unpaid? And why should Nigerians lose infrastructure simply because bureaucratic processes have outlived the calendar attached to a particular appropriation?

Yet, beneath those legitimate concerns lies a bigger question: why does Nigeria repeatedly find itself in this position?

The fourth extension has therefore moved the debate beyond whether the 2025 capital budget deserves additional time. It should compel the Federal Government, National Assembly and fiscal authorities to examine why budget implementation routinely falls behind schedule in the first place.

Presenting the amendment in the Red Chamber, Senate Leader, Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, explained that several capital projects remained at different stages of implementation, while significant amounts of released capital funds had not been utilised.

He noted that capital expenditure was not simply a matter of appropriating money. It involved procurement, contract award, mobilisation, execution, certification and payment, all of which had to be properly coordinated.

According to him, allowing the September 30 deadline to expire could create difficulties for ministries, departments and agencies seeking to complete projects already at advanced stages.

That reasoning is difficult to dismiss.

A budget is ultimately a legal authority for government to raise and spend public money for specified purposes. If money has been appropriated and released for a legitimate project, and the project is substantially underway, abruptly shutting down implementation could produce precisely the waste the government claims the extension is intended to prevent.

Senate President, Senator Godswill Akpabio made a similar argument, warning against allowing abandoned projects to proliferate across the country.

He said several contractors had neither completed their projects nor received full payment for work executed under the 2025 Appropriations Act, arguing that it would be counterproductive to allow the September 30 deadline to pass without providing additional time for the Federal Government to settle outstanding obligations.

But the argument also presents a paradox.

If extensions are repeatedly required to prevent projects from becoming abandoned, does the extension solve the underlying problem or merely postpone it?

That is where the intervention of the Senate Chief Whip, Senator Tahir Monguno, becomes particularly significant.

Monguno identified the centralised payment system domiciled in the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation as one of the factors responsible for delays in budget implementation.

His warning was blunt: unless the system is reviewed, Nigeria could continue returning to the National Assembly to seek extensions of budget implementation.

He described the policy as a “cork in the wheel” of budget implementation and urged the Executive to reconsider it.

The argument deserves serious attention because payment is one of the final but most critical links in the budget implementation chain.

A ministry may complete procurement. A contractor may mobilise. Work may progress. Certificates may be prepared and approved. But if payment remains trapped in a slow administrative process, the practical outcome is still delayed implementation.

Centralisation, in principle, can serve legitimate purposes. It can strengthen expenditure control, reduce leakages, improve visibility over government finances and prevent agencies from operating fragmented payment arrangements.

The problem, therefore, may not necessarily be centralisation itself but how centralisation is designed and operated.

A system intended to improve fiscal discipline should not become so cumbersome that legitimate expenditure is delayed indefinitely.

The Federal Government could consequently examine whether certain categories of already-approved payments can be processed through a more decentralised, technology-driven and accountable framework, while retaining central oversight.

Such a reform would not mean returning to an era of weak financial controls. Rather, it would mean combining central oversight with institutional responsibility.

There is also a need to distinguish between control and delay. A payment system that prevents fraud is valuable. A payment system that unnecessarily delays legitimate payments, however, can itself become a source of economic inefficiency.

Contractors depend on timely payments to maintain cash flow, pay workers, purchase materials and remain on project sites. When government payment delays occur, projects can slow down, costs can rise and contractors may ultimately price future contracts to accommodate perceived payment risks.

The consequences are eventually borne by the public. This is why the latest extension should not be treated simply as another legislative routine.

The Federal Government should use the additional three months as an opportunity to complete eligible projects and settle genuine outstanding obligations, but equally as a deadline for fixing the institutional weaknesses that made the extension necessary.

Otherwise, there is a legitimate fear that Nigerians may be having this same conversation again.

And that is the uncomfortable question hanging over the December 31 deadline: what happens when December 31 arrives and some projects are still incomplete?

Will the Executive return to the National Assembly for a fifth extension?

There is no reason to assume that it will not, particularly if the structural causes of delayed implementation remain unresolved.

Nigeria has had several years of experience with supplementary appropriations, budget extensions, delayed passage of appropriations and late implementation. While each episode may have its own explanation, the cumulative effect is a system in which the budget calendar does not always correspond with the government’s operational calendar.

That disconnect needs urgent attention.

One obvious solution is to begin the budget cycle earlier and enforce a predictable timetable for preparation, consideration, passage, assent and implementation.

The government cannot reasonably expect agencies to implement a full-year capital programme efficiently if the legal and administrative processes required to activate the programme consume a substantial portion of the year.

The Executive and National Assembly must therefore work towards a budget calendar that gives Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) the maximum possible implementation period.

There must also be stronger project-readiness requirements.

Government should stop appropriating large numbers of projects that are not sufficiently prepared for execution. Before a major capital project enters the budget, the responsible agency should ideally have completed critical preparatory stages, including design, feasibility, procurement planning, land acquisition where applicable and other necessary approvals.

Appropriating thousands of projects without adequate implementation capacity creates a wide gap between what the government promises and what it can realistically deliver.

Another reform should involve stronger quarterly performance monitoring.

Instead of discovering near the end of the fiscal cycle that billions of naira remain unutilised, the Executive should know by the end of every quarter which projects are on schedule, which are delayed and why.

Where delays result from contractors, appropriate contractual remedies should be applied. Where the problem is procurement, the relevant process should be accelerated within the law. Where payment is responsible, the bottleneck should be identified and removed. Where an MDA lacks capacity, responsibility should be escalated.

The answer cannot always be another extension.

The National Assembly also has a role to play. Parliamentary oversight should increasingly move from examining budgetary allocations to measuring actual outcomes. It is not enough to ask how much was appropriated, released or spent. Legislators should also ask what Nigerians received for the money.

A road that is 60 per cent physically completed but 90 per cent financially paid for requires scrutiny. A project that has received substantial releases without corresponding physical progress requires scrutiny. Similarly, a project that has reached 90 per cent physical completion but remains unpaid because of an administrative bottleneck requires urgent intervention.

This is where technology can transform budget oversight.

The government should establish a transparent, real-time project-monitoring system through which the status of major capital projects can be tracked from appropriation to completion.

Such a system could show the amount appropriated, amount released, contractor, physical progress, amount certified, amount paid and outstanding obligations.

With such information available to policymakers, auditors, legislators, civil society and citizens, the annual argument over whether money was “released” or “utilised” would become more meaningful.

The ultimate test is not whether the books show that funds have been released. It is whether the expenditure has translated into public value.

There is also the question of cash-flow planning. Government ministries cannot implement capital projects effectively if appropriations are made without realistic projections of when funds will become available.

A more disciplined approach would align annual cash releases with project milestones, allowing contractors and MDAs to plan execution more effectively.

The Federal Government should also consider whether the present architecture of financial controls distributes responsibility efficiently.

Monguno’s criticism of the centralised payment system should not be dismissed as a mere political complaint. It provides an opportunity for a technical review of whether the current arrangement delivers the right balance between control, accountability and speed.

The objective should be straightforward: centralise oversight, not unnecessary delay.

If the Accountant-General’s office must retain central control over public funds, it should have the technology, staffing, service standards and internal processes required to approve legitimate transactions promptly.

There should be measurable timelines for processing payments, with automated tracking and escalation mechanisms where transactions exceed prescribed periods.

At the same time, MDAs should bear responsibility for ensuring that payment requests are complete, properly documented and compliant with procurement and financial regulations.

This would create a system in which neither the central payment authority nor the implementing agency can indefinitely blame the other for delays.

Ultimately, the Senate’s fourth extension should be viewed as both a rescue measure and a warning.

It is a rescue measure because terminating ongoing projects without allowing them to be completed could waste public resources and leave Nigerians with more abandoned infrastructure.

But it is also a warning because repeated extensions suggest that the normal budget implementation architecture is not working as efficiently as it should.

The Federal Government cannot permanently solve an implementation problem by extending the implementation deadline.

At some point, the calendar must become an accountability mechanism.

December 31 should therefore not merely become another date on the Nigerian budget calendar. It should be treated as a hard opportunity to demonstrate that projects already funded can be completed within a defined period, outstanding legitimate obligations can be settled and the bottlenecks responsible for delayed implementation can be addressed.

Otherwise, the next extension may become inevitable. And if Nigeria returns to the National Assembly asking for a fifth extension, the debate will no longer be about whether the government needs more time. It will be about why the government could not use the time it had.