Nigeria’s Triple Budget Problem: Why 3 Spending Plans Are Running at Once

Nigeria is currently operating three budgets at the same time, the 2024 budget, the 2024 supplementary budget, and the 2025 budget. Lawmakers say it is “continuity.” Many economists and lawyers call it confusion. 

By extending the 2024 budget’s life deep into 2025, while the 2025 budget is already active, the country now has overlapping laws, timelines, and project lists. 

The result is blurred accountability, messy tracking, and slower delivery of roads, schools, hospitals, and power projects that citizens urgently need.

How We Got Here

The National Assembly extended the 2024 Appropriation Act through December 2025. This happened after the 2025 budget was signed. On paper, the aim was to prevent projects from stalling at year’s end and to keep contractors on site. 

In practice, it created two full-year budgets (plus a supplement) pulling from the same purse at the same time. Nigeria’s Constitution defines a financial year as January to December unless changed by law; the extension was not paired with a formal reset of the fiscal calendar.

Why It’s a Problem

First, it breaks clarity. Ministries and agencies now struggle to decide which vote to charge for a project, the 2024 main budget, the 2024 supplementary, or the 2025 budget. 

That makes planning, cash releases, and procurement harder to manage. Second, it weakens transparency. When the same project appears in more than one budget year, it becomes easy to duplicate line items, inflate claims, or shuffle funds without a clear paper trail. Third, it delays capital spending. 

Salaries and debt service are paid first; projects get pushed, re-scoped, or deferred, and citizens feel little impact from either budget.

The Money Pressures Behind the Chaos

Debt service now consumes the bulk of government revenue, leaving little room for capital projects unless borrowing rises. 

At the same time, naira depreciation makes imported materials and dollar-linked contracts more expensive midstream.

Even when revenues beat target, these pressures can still squeeze capital releases and force last-minute reprioritisation.

Ordinary Nigerians lose twice: they pay for budgets that don’t translate quickly into finished projects, and they live with the costs of delay, bad roads, crowded classrooms, unreliable clinics, and weak power. 

When project payments are held up between overlapping votes, work slows, layoffs increase, and claims accumulate. The economy gets less of the stimulus that a clear, timely capital budget should provide.

What Continuity Should Look Like

Continuity is not the same as overlap. If the government wants to keep projects moving past December, it should carry unspent funds into the next year through a clean reappropriation—one active budget, one set of project IDs, one cash plan. If a different fiscal calendar (for example, April to March) would improve execution, then change the law and adopt it formally. Ad hoc extensions only deepen confusion.

Nigeria can restore order with a few steps. First, return to one active appropriation per year and make all project carryovers visible in the new year’s budget with the same project codes. Second, publish a monthly, public execution dashboard that shows releases and payments project by project, ministry by ministry. 

Third, enforce lapse and revalidation rules so old lines expire cleanly on December 31 and any continuation is reapproved openly.

Fourth, protect capital spending with quarterly cash limits that cannot be raided for recurrent costs. Finally, empower the Auditor General to flag duplicate entries across years and to publish findings on strict timelines.