By Aboubakr Kaira Barry

President Tinubu’s reforms since May 2023 deserve genuine acknowledgement. Unifying the exchange rate, removing the fuel subsidy and rebuilding gross reserves above $40 billion represent the most serious structural adjustment Nigeria has attempted in a generation.

Federation revenues have nearly doubled year-on-year in some months. And yet the IMF projects real output per capita growth at around 0.6 per cent in 2025. Debt service rivals the combined allocations for health, education, and infrastructure. More money flowing through D-rated systems does not produce better services. It produces larger leakages.

Three structural changes
Three structural changes are required, and none needs a constitutional amendment.
First, the President should establish a PFM Monitoring and Tracking Office within the Presidency, mandated to publish quarterly implementation scorecards for every federal PFM reform commitment. Its role is not to implement — that belongs to Finance, the Budget Office, and the OAGF. Its role is political accountability: making reform slippage visible at the apex.

Second, Nigeria should pass legislation establishing an independent Office of Budget Responsibility modelled on the UK’s OBR. An independent OBR scrutinises budget assumptions and publishes findings without executive clearance — ensuring no government presents a budget built on implausible oil projections without an independent institution saying so publicly.

Third, while states have constitutional autonomy, the Federal Government possesses sufficient fiscal levers to promote expenditure accountability and resolve the perennial failure of states to release funds to local governments. Three instruments are available.
Fiscal performance weighting in the revenue sharing formula

The Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) reviews the Federation Account sharing formula periodically. Currently anchored on population, land mass and equality of states, the formula should incorporate a fiscal performance score. States that publish audited accounts, demonstrate internally generated revenue growth, and comply with LGA remittance obligations would receive a marginally larger share; those that fail these benchmarks would receive marginally less.

PFM conditionality on state borrowing approvals
The Debt Management Office (DMO) approves state borrowing based principally on debt service capacity. The reform is straightforward: add fiscal governance conditions. Before a state receives DMO approval, it must demonstrate that its last two years of accounts have been audited and published, that it has not withheld LGA allocations, that it has adopted the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) and that its debt-to-revenue ratio falls within a sustainable band.

Public fiscal performance scorecard at NEC
The Federal Government should restructure National Economic Council meetings with state governors to incorporate a Public Fiscal Performance Scorecard — a league table covering each state across four dimensions: revenue generation performance, audit compliance status, expenditure quality and LGA allocation remittance and debt sustainability position. The recommended Financial Management Office in the Presidency shall serve as secretariat, responsible for compiling, validating, and publishing the scorecard after each meeting, simultaneously to the press, civil society and international partners, including the World Bank and the IMF.

The President should leverage the current legislative majority to pass the requisite laws. If the government could enact the recent tax reform bills, it could — with comparable political will — legislate the architecture of sound financial management, laying the foundation for Nigeria to become the leading nation it has the potential to be.

The distance between Nigeria’s 1.67 and Rwanda’s 3.12 is not merely a data point. It is the distance between revenues collected and services delivered.

Tinubu has done what his predecessors would not. But stabilising the macroeconomy is the precondition for PFM reform, not a substitute for it. As Justice Louis Brandeis observed, sunlight is the greatest disinfectant. By bringing national visibility to these institutional failures and building the architecture for best-practice financial management, Tinubu can lay the foundation for the effective utilisation of Nigeria’s resources — and make the case that governance, not just growth, is what will make Nigeria great.