The Budget Cannot Pay Its Bills. The Assembly Does Not Want to Know. __An emergency sitting has been called for Monday. Contractors are still waiting. The Health Ministry received 0.0165 percent of its capital budget last year. And the National Assembly is being asked, as it always is, to simply move the goalpost. By Ekeh Chidiebere
The Budget Cannot Pay Its Bills. The Assembly Does Not Want to Know.
__An emergency sitting has been called for Monday. Contractors are still waiting. The Health Ministry received 0.0165 percent of its capital budget last year. And the National Assembly is being asked, as it always is, to simply move the goalpost_ .
By Ekeh Chidiebere
Read the notice slowly. Not for what it says. For what it does not say.
On the 11th of June 2026, the Acting Clerk of the House of Representatives wrote to all Honourable Members directing them to an emergency sitting on Monday, the 15th of June. The legal authority cited is Order Five, Rule 2(2) of the Standing Orders. The purpose stated is to consider an amendment bill that would extend the implementation window for the capital aspect of the 2025 Appropriation Act from the 30th of June to the 30th of September. Three months. Quietly. Under emergency procedures.
There is no explanation in the notice for why the capital budget has not been implemented. No letter from the Finance Minister. No statement from the Budget Office. No presidential address to the nation. Just a one-page directive from an Acting Clerk, four words of purpose, and a request for priority attendance.
Nigeria, the notice suggests, will sort itself out.
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This is not a procedural matter. It is a confession, written in the careful language of bureaucratic understatement. And the numbers behind it are not abstract.
This is also not the first extension. It is the third. In February 2026, the Accountant-General of the Federation announced that 70 percent of the 2025 capital budget would be rolled over into 2026, with only 30 percent expected to be implemented by year-end. The Senate has already passed its own version of this extension. Now the House is being asked to formalise what has long been the reality: Nigeria is simultaneously trying to implement the 2024 and 2025 budgets inside the 2026 fiscal year. The appropriation cycle has not just slipped. It has collapsed.
“Nigeria is simultaneously trying to implement the 2024 and 2025 budgets inside the 2026 fiscal year. The appropriation cycle has not just slipped. It has collapsed.”
Here is what the record actually shows. When ministers went to the National Assembly earlier this year to defend their 2026 budget proposals, they were compelled, under questioning, to disclose what happened to their 2025 capital allocations. The disclosures were staggering. The Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare was appropriated N218 billion for capital projects in 2025. What the treasury actually released: N36 million. Not N36 billion. N36 million. A performance rate of 0.0165 percent. The Minister of Health, Mohammed Pate, said this himself, on the floor of the House, to the same Honourable Members who will sit on Monday morning and vote to extend the deadline.
The Ministry of Transportation received approximately N2.57 billion of its capital allocation. The full picture across MDAs, documented in Vanguard’s April 2026 investigation, is consistent: multiple ministries and agencies received zero percent of their capital releases in both 2024 and 2025. Zero. The Budget Office’s own medium-term framework acknowledged that less than 10 percent of the pro-rata capital budget had been released to MDAs by July 2025. Against a pro-rata benchmark of N10.81 trillion for the first seven months of 2025, actual capital releases came to N834.80 billion. The funding gap for that period alone: N9.98 trillion.
Now consider who absorbs that gap. Not the ministries. Not the Budget Office. The contractors. The civil engineer who mobilised equipment and workers to a federal road project in Kogi. The pharmaceutical supplier who stocked a primary healthcare centre in Benue. The construction firm that borrowed from a commercial bank to fund a government contract and is now servicing that loan from personal savings. BudgIT’s State of States report puts subnational contractor arrears at N434.87 billion across 26 states for the 2024 fiscal year alone. At the federal level, the government acknowledged a backlog of between N1.5 trillion and N4 trillion, the latter figure claimed by the All Indigenous Contractors Association of Nigeria in protests that blocked the gates of this same National Assembly last year. The 2026 Appropriation Bill itself carries a line item of N1.7 trillion described as “Provision for 2024 Outstanding Contractor Liabilities.” Another N100 billion appears separately as “Payment of Local Contractors’ Debts.” The government budgeted to pay yesterday’s bills with tomorrow’s money, and tomorrow has already become today.
“The government budgeted to pay yesterday’s bills with tomorrow’s money. And tomorrow has already become today.”
Notice what is not on that list of distressed agencies. The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority collects its landing fees. The Nigerian Communications Commission collects its spectrum levies. The agencies that generate their own revenue pay their contractors. The ones that depend on Abuja to release capital funds are the ones whose suppliers have not been paid in two years. That distinction is not incidental. It is the entire diagnosis. This is not a cash flow problem. It is a prioritisation and transparency failure with named victims and an unnamed cause.
What is the cause? The Finance Ministry, in a March 2026 document signed by the Special Adviser to the Minister, described the situation as “fiscal correction, not fiscal collapse.” Federal revenue, the document noted, rose from N12.48 trillion in 2023 to approximately N22 trillion by November 2025. The ministry argued that total capital expenditure in 2024 reached N11.59 trillion, approximately 84 percent of the capital budget. The Presidency has not directly contested the MDA-level figures. It has simply offered a different frame. The ministries say they received nothing. The ministry of finance says capital spending was 84 percent. Both cannot be true in the same way. That contradiction has never been explained in public, to Nigerians, in plain language.
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And yet here is where we must be precise about what Monday actually means.
The House Committee on Appropriations has the statutory power to have resolved this contradiction months ago. It can summon the Finance Minister, the Accountant-General, the Budget Director-General. It can demand a published capital release schedule, MDA by MDA, naira by naira. It can hold public hearings at which the Health Minister’s N36 million figure is placed alongside the Finance Ministry’s 84 percent claim, and someone is compelled to explain the arithmetic. It has not done this. BudgIT documented 11,122 projects worth N6.93 trillion inserted into the 2025 budget by the National Assembly itself, many of them going to agencies with no capacity to execute them. The legislature that padded the appropriation is now being asked to extend it. The irony would be rich if the consequences were not so severe.
Anyone who has watched the National Assembly through more than one budget cycle knows what the hours before a contentious vote look like. The phones are busy. The arithmetic changes. By the time the Acting Clerk calls Monday’s session to order, the outcome is rarely in doubt. What remains in doubt is only the margin. The Green Chamber will grant the extension. The executive will have its three months. The contractors will keep waiting. The N36 million that reached the Health Ministry will remain the most damning sentence in this government’s fiscal record, and no committee will be asked to explain it.
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The House of Representatives is not being asked to legislate on Monday. It is being asked to ratify. There is a difference. One requires judgment. The other requires attendance.
The legislature has been sold what it always gets: the illusion of relevance without the inconvenience of accountability. And it has, with reliable consistency, accepted the transaction.
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So what remains for those of us outside the chamber?
The courts are not closed. SERAP has already demonstrated the path, having filed suit against President Tinubu and the Attorney-General over N167 billion paid to contractors across 31 MDAs for projects that were never executed. That suit is a model. A coalition of unpaid contractors, a civil society organisation with public interest standing, a group of Nigerians who can afford counsel and a filing fee, can walk into the Federal High Court and compel the Accountant-General to publish the capital release schedule the law already requires him to publish. They can seek an order compelling the Budget Office to produce the quarterly implementation report that statute mandates. The Health Ministry’s N36 million figure is already in the public record. It was stated under oath, before the House. A court does not need to find new facts. It needs to be asked to enforce ones that are already established.
And the streets are not forbidden. Lawful assembly is a constitutional right. The contractors who blocked the National Assembly gates last year were exercising it. Market associations, professional bodies, civil society coalitions, and ordinary Nigerians who have watched hospitals go without drugs and roads go without repairs while budgets are extended and deadlines are moved, all have the right to gather, to petition, and to refuse to be quiet. These are not alternatives for different classes of citizens. They are two tracks of one pressure campaign. The courts create legal jeopardy. The streets create political cost. Together, they are the only language that has ever moved a Nigerian government.
A budget that appropriated N218 billion for health and released N36 million is not a fiscal document. It is a statement of priorities. Monday’s emergency sitting is not about extending a deadline. It is about whether anyone will finally demand that those priorities be explained
