Expert warns Nigeria’s 2026 budget signals governance breakdown

A leading digital transformation and credit-risk professional, Rotimi Odunaike, has issued a warning over Nigeria’s proposed 2026 federal budget, describing it as evidence that the country is no longer borrowing to build, but borrowing to survive.

In an analysis titled “The debt-to-survival crisis: The 2026 budget debt ceiling in Nigeria”, Odunaike argued that the federal government’s N54.43 trillion expenditure proposal – with a projected deficit of N20.10 trillion, reflects deep-seated fiscal mismanagement rather than economic consolidation.

According to the proposal, debt servicing alone is expected to reach N15.91 trillion in 2026, accounting for a significant share of projected revenues.

Odunaike noted that, in private-sector terms, any organisation where maintenance costs consume between 30 and 50 percent of income would be considered financially unviable.

He said, “Nigeria is operating a clinically dead business model”, adding that requests to further raise the country’s debt ceiling amount to postponing an inevitable reckoning.

Odunaike, who has worked on process improvement projects across six continents, criticised what he described as the “institutionalisation of inefficiency” in Nigeria’s public finance system.

Nigeria is currently implementing an extended 2024 budget alongside the 2025 budget, a practice Odunaike said obscures accountability and weakens fiscal oversight.

He also faulted a directive instructing ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) to roll over 70 percent of their 2025 capital allocations into 2026.

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“In any functional corporate environment, failure to execute 70 percent of assigned deliverables leads to termination. In Nigeria, it earns a rollover and fresh funding”, he said.

The analysis further raised concerns over what Odunaike termed “revenue hallucinations”, where he cited official admissions and that only N10 trillion was realised from a N40 trillion revenue projection in 2025, yet the 2026 budget is built on assumptions of N1,512 to the dollar and oil production of 1.8 million barrels per day.

To illustrate alternative governance outcomes, Odunaike compared Nigeria with Botswana, pointing to stark differences in inflation stability, government spending efficiency, and citizen welfare despite similar debt-to-GDP ratios.

While Nigeria’s government expenditure stands at 18.5 percent of GDP, Botswana allocates over 33 percent, translating into more direct social impact. Botswana’s sovereign wealth management was also contrasted with Nigeria’s largely depleted Excess Crude Account.

“The difference isn’t resources. It’s process discipline,” Odunaike said and described Nigerian citizens as recipients of “the worst service delivery in the world,” arguing that debt payments and governance costs leave little fiscal space for public welfare.

He warned that Nigeria has reached a “product development dead-end”, where the state demands increasing financial sacrifice from citizens while delivering diminishing returns.

Odunaike called for immediate corrective action, including strict enforcement of the Fiscal Responsibility Act’s 3 percent deficit-to-GDP limit, the deployment of real-time digital tools to track budget implementation, and more conservative revenue assumptions grounded in actual oil production levels.