BudgIT, a prominent civic-tech organisation promoting transparency and accountability in Nigeria’s public finance, has raised serious concerns over the refusal of the Federal Ministry of Finance, through the Budget Office, to publish Quarterly Budget Implementation Reports (BIR), describing the ministry’s action as a violation of the fiscal law, usual practice and a clear erosion of the dissemination and transparency reforms of past administrations in the country.
The civil society advocacy group, in a statement issued on Thursday by its Senior Communication Associate, Nancy Odimegwu, maintained that the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 in Part V, Budgetary Execution and Achievement of Targets, section 30 that the publication of the performance of the federal budget on quarterly basis was mandatory
It clarified: “The Minister of Finance shall cause the report (on the Implementation of the Annual Budget) prepared pursuant to subsection (1) of this section to be published in the mass and electronic media and on the Ministry of Finance website, not later than 30 days after the end of each quarter.”
BudgIT recalled that the previous administration, in its two terms, published a minimum of 3 BIRs per fiscal year. With nearly 4 BIRs pending from Q2, 2024, to Q2, 2025, the current administration has not published a single BIR in nearly one fiscal year.
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According to the CSO, Budget Implementation Reports are not only a requirement of the law and established practice, they are an indication of a government’s willingness to be transparent and to provide evidence of its spending.
It expatiated: “The proof of this spending is crucial to assess the quality of implementation of its budget and, more broadly, the quality of the delivery of public goods and services. Public sector accounting principles emphasize the need to publish and disseminate financial information as a matter of professional practice and to secure the engagement of the public, a significant stakeholder in public financial management.
“It is troubling that the current administration has ignored the law and refused to publish a key public document. It would have been preferred that the current administration build on the foundation of previous governments and, in addition to regular implementation reports, publish and disseminate the Federal Cash Plan Disbursement Schedule, per section 26 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act. This poor state of affairs is all the more compelling, considering the current administration has just concluded spending on the 2024 Appropriation (though it is unclear if the 2024 Supplementary.
“Appropriation is still being implemented). Regrettably, the Ministry of Finance and Budget Office of the Federation have withheld crucial information that the private sector is meant to use for planning, information that Civil Society and the Academia are meant to use for their advocacy and analysis and information that will show the international community that Nigeria operates according to accepted norms and conventions of international public finance”, it added.
BudgIT further stated that perhaps more worrying was the fact that this disposition towards providing public information does not end with Quarterly BIRs but extends to the government’s own public platforms, namely OpenTreasury.gov, which used to be the go-to source of information on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly spending of the federal government.
It pointed out that while the platform was not perfect (several government Ministries, Departments and Agencies’ spending data was absent, links were broken, and the data was often not machine-readable), it was largely comprehensive and a demonstration of transparency and the willingness of the government to be held accountable as it had not updated the platform with new information since January 2025.
Commenting on the worrisome development, BudgIT’s Group Head of Research and Policy Advisory, Vahyala Kwaga, contended that the unwillingness of this administration to publish what was once a matter of routine was discouraging.
Kwaga said: “The ability of a government to hold itself accountable to its laws is not only to be expected of a democracy such as ours but is an indication of adherence to the rule of law. The non-publishing of crucial information by the Ministry of Finance and the Budget Office of the Federation should not be augmented by ‘pronouncements’ by the Minister/Director General in the media. It should be done by publishing financial information according to existing laws. Citizens and the general public have a right to know and a right to be informed.”
Based on the fiscal lapse, BudgIT called on the Ministry of Finance and the Budget Office of the Federation, and the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to uphold the principles of transparency, legal compliance, and accountability in the management of public funds.
It also urged Nigerians, civil society organisations, the organised private sector (OPS), academia/research, and the international community, to collectively demand for the urgent publication of the expenditure performance underpinning the Federal Government’s 2024 budget as all stakeholders in the public finance system have a right to know.
