Nigeria’s 2026 Appropriation Act is decidedly a can of worms. This chilling reality seized national consciousness with the discovery in July of ₦1.3 billion allocated to a fake agency – the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council. A media report that ₦780 million was expended on musical equipment for churches in the Bende Federal Constituency of Abia State from the same budget – with this unabashedly rationalised as originating from the 2025 budget – dropped more jaws.
A civic tech platform, Tracka, which scrutinised the budget, revealed details that exacerbated the public’s fury. There is the ₦962.83 billion set aside for the procurement of Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) and empowerment projects that are not national priorities. A total of 78 ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) of government are being used to perpetuate this rip-off. So far in this Fourth Republic, no national budget has been as huge in frivolities and lacking in transparency as this year’s document.
According to Tracka, “…only 70 per cent of 2,579 empowerment projects have clearly identified implementation locations.” This means that the remaining 30 per cent deal with phantom or ghost projects. Besides, many projects subsumed under the allocations of MDAs are outside their core mandates. This deception thus makes it easier for the funds to be siphoned.
