The concerns of financial experts and well-meaning citizens about the simultaneous implementation of several budgets should worry the federal government, which is at the centre of the fiscal policy deemed inappropriate. In particular, the practice is widely perceived as lacking transparency, leading to suspicions that the budgetary process can be manipulated. President Bola Tinubu and his administration can ill afford this perception. They should therefore steer the country’s financial machinery away from this unhealthy path.

There are moments in a national economic history when the biggest challenge to stability is not the absence of money, but the lack of fiscal discipline. For Nigeria, the signs of this moment are visible in every one of the last five budgets, highlighting near-zero commitment to implementing capital appropriations, overlapping budget implementation, unrealistic revenue benchmarks, duplicated projects, padding, and opaque borrowing.

In the past few weeks, off-the-book spending (another manifestation of the growing tendency to undermine the best fiscal culture) caught the eye of both the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Much as this may sound like a new indulgence, until recently, the Federal Government had funded the fuel subsidy line item through a direct deduction by NNPC Limited, which raised suspicion and lacked transparency. In the dark days of ways and means (W&Ms) financing, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) advanced tens of trillions of naira to the Federal Government in blatant violation of its enabling law, with no recourse to legislative scrutiny or the tenet of the budget the facilities were meant to support.

Recently, the IMF reopened old wounds when it disclosed that the government had omitted public spending equivalent to two per cent of its GDP from recent official budgets, creating a gap between its reported deficit and its actual financing needs. As expected, the revelation by the IMF Resident Representative in Nigeria, Christian Ebeke, has pitted opposition politicians against the government. The political opposition, which is oiling its campaign machinery ahead of the 2027 election, has interpreted the IMF disclosure as an indictment, calling for further investigation and even President Bola Tinubu’s resignation.

But the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, has dismissed the criticism of the label “shadow budgets” inferred from the IMF’s recent Article IV report. He explained that the statistical discrepancies noted by the IMF were due to the reporting presentation of multi-year capital projects, statutory transfers and lawful debt rollovers. He insisted that there were no breaches of the country’s fiscal framework and dismissed suspicions of secret expenditures.

Perhaps, further clarification by the IMF officials is necessary to help Nigerians – the ultimate victims of opaque spending and poor reporting – to properly assess the level of threat posed by the infractions flagged by the report. National economic management is too serious for one-directional sound bites. Unresolved statements of indictment create more problems than they solve. In the context of an ongoing partnership, it is important that the Federal Government seek an opportunity to engage the fund’s technical team.

Regardless of how this strand of national economic management philosophy is resolved, the Federal Government has much to do to restore the culture of budgeting as the grundnorm of public spending. Last year, the President wrote to the National Assembly seeking the reenactment of the 2024 and 2025 appropriations as part of the process of overlapping budgets. Whereas the President’s thoughts were commendable, rolling over the 2025 capital project implementation into this year raises questions about the current administration’s commitment to achieving tidier budgeting.

In defending the government, Oyedele had explained that multi-year capital project executions, which often extend beyond a single fiscal year, are implemented under existing legal provisions, including approved capital rollovers where necessary. Indeed, multi-year projects, whether implemented by governments or private-sector operators, span multiple years. But what a government cannot conveniently roll over across fiscal periods without overburdening monitoring and reporting mechanisms is a spending envelope earmarked and approved for a year. For the same reason, the country’s approach to executing multi-year capital projects needs an urgent recalibration.

Besides the government, the citizens are important participants in the budget process, whether in execution, monitoring or reporting. They need a clear, delineated implementation timeline and cost to play their part. In a country where elected lawmakers readily defer to the executive’s wishes, on the grounds that the watchword should be cooperation rather than confrontation, the parliament is nevertheless the first-order condition for achieving responsible and accountable governance. There is an urgent need for the second-order condition, which the people and the civil society organisations should step in to guarantee. The role of this novel but important part of the tenet of checks and balances should not be complicated by multi-year budgeting that does not clearly specify yearly deliverables and costs, as exemplified by traditional yearly appropriations.

The controversy surrounding off-budget spending is therefore not a mere technical matter that can be explained away with a press statement. It is a fundamental challenge to constitutional governance, fiscal transparency and public trust. A country battling a severe debt burden, weak revenue mobilisation, wide infrastructure deficit and broad-based poverty cannot afford to run two budgets – one visible and another concealed in the shadows of executive discretion. The scale of the problem should concern every Nigerian. The extra-budgetary spending could have gone into the construction of the much-needed super highways or the purchase of important military hardware, but as long as the decision is devoid of the rigour of legislative debate, a key part of representative democracy, it is not good enough. Democracy, in practice, must prevail in our national decision-making process.

Nigeria’s fiscal crisis will not be solved with creative accounting or by pushing expenditures into the shadows. It will not be solved by presenting one budget to the legislature while operating another through discretionary channels. The country needs a single, credible and transparent budget that captures the full stretch of government operations. And that single budget must pass the rigour of lawmaking or oversight, either as a main or supplementary budget. No project or expenditure must be too urgent to undermine this process.