ADC’S PRELIMINARY REVIEW OF THE 2026 BUDGET: 2026 Budget: A budget of quicksand, more debt and wishful thinking
In a list of bullets accompanying its Team of Economists’ preliminary review of the 2026 budget, the African Democratic Congress (ADC), according to a chieftain, Lauretta Onochie, arrives at the fact that “Tinubu is borrowing like there will be no Nigeria after him”. Excerpts:
1. After a careful review of the 2026 Budget Proposal presented to the National Assembly by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Friday, December 19, 2025, the ADC Team of Economists concludes as follows:
2. Although it was presented as a “Budget of Consolidation, Renewed Resilience and Shared Prosperity,” what was laid before Nigerians is merely a consolidation of fiscal recklessness and renewed wishful thinking that have become the hallmark of the Tinubu administration. If approved, the only thing this budget is capable of sharing is more debt and greater misery in the years ahead.
3. The 2026 budget proposal simply copies the templates of the failed, poorly implemented, and perhaps unimplementable 2024 and 2025 budgets, and will most likely end the same way, with the bulk of its implementation deferred to another year.
4. We are witnessing a government attempting to build a house on quicksand, presenting a new fiscal framework at a time when the 2025 budget has only just been repealed and reenacted, in a display of unprecedented fiscal chaos and administrative incompetence.
We are witnessing a government attempting to build a house on quicksand, presenting a new fiscal framework at a time when the 2025 budget has only just been repealed and reenacted, in a display of unprecedented fiscal chaos and administrative incompetence.
5. The truth is that Nigeria is caught in a fiscal mess. But rather than confront these problems, the Tinubu administration has continued to kick the can down the street, believing it can hide yawning cracks under mountains of unsustainable debt that mortgage the future of the next generation, while indulging in financial profligacy.
6. This administration fails to grasp a fundamental economic truth: no amount of monetary tinkering or central bank intervention can rescue an economy if the government refuses to embrace fiscal discipline and budget credibility. What we have seen under this Tinubu APC administration is a chaotic attempt to implement more than four budgets simultaneously, because it lacks the basic competence to close out previous cycles and adhere to its own timelines.
7. Governments may extend budget implementation periods or manage supplementary budgets, but operating three or more national budgets simultaneously is President Tinubu’s original contribution to fiscal chaos. It has never happened before in this country.
8. Overall, what is most evident is the administration’s penchant for turning fiscal planning into a hollow ritual and political ceremony that mocks the suffering of the Nigerian people. While revenues were pushed to N20tn in 2024, a figure driven more by the pain of currency devaluation than genuine economic productivity, the government had the audacity to double its projections to N40tn for 2025, and then raise it further to N58.57tn in 2026. This is not vision, it is fantasy.
9. The 2026 budget, which remains dangerously scant on detail, embarks on yet another unsustainable expansion built on a foundation of quicksand. At a time when oil projections are weakening and global prices are dipping as tensions in Europe show signs of cooling, the Federal Government has inexplicably set a benchmark of $64 per barrel. Instead of adopting a conservative posture to shield the nation from global volatility, it is chasing a N34tn revenue target that is completely disconnected from reality, especially now that the artificial bounce provided by the devaluation of the Naira has fully evaporated. One is left to wonder whether this government ever considers alternative scenarios beyond those that suit its own mindset.
