Tag: BudgIT

The Global Director of BudgIT, Oluseun Onigbinde, has called on state governments to deepen fiscal reforms and build stronger local economies that can sustain their ambitions without overdependence on federal allocations.

Speaking in Abuja at the 10th anniversary of the State of States report, Onigbinde said the initiative was conceived from a simple belief that every public kobo meant for citizens should be traceable, justified, and used to improve lives.

He said the State of States report, which began a decade ago as a modest effort to promote fiscal transparency, had become a national benchmark for assessing governance at the subnational level.

“Every year, we gather not just to present numbers, charts, or fiscal rankings,” he said. “We gather to hold up a mirror — a mirror that reflects the choices our state governments are making, the paths they are taking, and the opportunities they are either seizing or leaving on the table.”

Onigbinde noted that when the project began, only five states in the federation published their budgets, but today, transparency has become a competitive advantage among governors who now await the report’s rankings with keen interest.

He acknowledged the progress made over the years, crediting it to citizens’ growing demand for accountability and the emergence of reform-minded leaders who understand the power of data in governance.

“Governors now wait eagerly — sometimes nervously — to see where they stand. Citizens have stronger voices. Data has become a lever for accountability. We celebrate that progress sincerely,” he said.

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However, the BudgIT chief warned that despite the gains, Nigeria remains at a fiscal crossroads. He pointed to the widening gap between potential and performance in many states, adding that inflation and debt obligations were rising faster than household earnings and revenue reforms.

“We must be honest with ourselves,” Onigbinde said. “Many states still rely excessively on federal allocations rather than building resilient local economies. The gap between potential and performance remains wide.”

He said the essence of this year’s report was not to name winners or losers, but to encourage collective responsibility toward building sustainable governance structures that prioritize human development and economic opportunity.

“Today’s conversations are therefore not about winners and losers. They are about ensuring that children can learn in safe classrooms, that small businesses can thrive without being strangled by taxes or power costs, and that basic healthcare is not a privilege but a guarantee,” he added.

Onigbinde emphasized that the State of States report is not merely BudgIT’s publication, but a public resource and a call to action for leaders and citizens alike.

“Nigeria’s future is not shaped only in Abuja,” he said. “The engine of national prosperity must fire in Kano, Enugu, Bauchi, Oyo, Rivers, Sokoto, and across every corner of this federation.”

He thanked BudgIT’s partners and reform advocates in government who, despite challenges, continue to push for improved governance and accountability.

As the report marks its 10th anniversary, Onigbinde urged state governments to move beyond transparency checklists and adopt innovation-driven policies that prioritize education, healthcare, and infrastructure as the pillars of sustainable development.

“Let us build states that can fund their ambitions through innovation — states that see transparency not as a box to tick but as a foundation for trust,” he said.

Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, Mr. Taiwo Oyedele, urged subnational governments to use the current surge in federal allocations to build sustainable, people-centered economies rather than expand recurrent expenditures that do little to improve citizens’ lives.

Speaking on the theme “A Decade of Subnational Fiscal Evolution,” Oyedele commended BudgIT for sustaining ten years of evidence-based fiscal analysis, describing the report as “a consistent, unblinking light on the financial health of Nigeria’s states.”

“Today, we are not merely launching another report,” Oyedele said. “We are marking ten years of fiscal X-rays—ten years of holding a mirror to our subnational governments and asking a profound question: what have we done with the resources entrusted to us?”

Oyedele observed that the 2025 edition of the report comes at a defining moment for Nigeria’s fiscal landscape. Since May 2023, he noted, the country has witnessed sweeping economic reforms including the removal of fuel subsidy, floating of the naira, and tax restructuring — measures that, despite their pains, helped to avert a potential economic collapse.

He revealed that the total Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) transfers nearly doubled within a year, from ₦5.4 trillion in 2023 to ₦11.4 trillion in 2024, as a result of these reforms.

“States are receiving more money than ever before,” he said. “But there is a paradox — while governments have more naira, ordinary Nigerians have less disposable income in their pockets. Fiscal abundance does not automatically translate into social prosperity.”

According to Oyedele, the report shows that 21 states now rely on federal allocations for at least 70% of their total revenue, an indication that FAAC dependency has worsened over the past year.

Nonetheless, he highlighted several bright spots in revenue generation, noting that Enugu grew its internally generated revenue (IGR) by 381%, Bayelsa by 174%, and Abia by 129%. Lagos, Ogun, Kwara, Anambra, and Edo, he said, continued to display resilience through steady IGR performance.

Oyedele urged states to convert their current windfalls into sustainable fiscal capacity, taking advantage of new tax laws that expand VAT shares, assign the electronic money transfer levy entirely to states, and offer tax exemptions for government bonds to reduce borrowing costs.

The 2025 report ranked Anambra as the best-performing state, followed by Lagos, Kwara, Abia, and Edo. Akwa Ibom and Zamfara were also commended for significant improvements.

The Director-General of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), Dr. AbdulLateef Shittu, commended BudgIT for sustaining the State of States report for a decade, describing it as a credible tool for promoting fiscal transparency and accountability across Nigeria’s 36 states.

Shittu said the theme, “A Decade of Subnational Fiscal Analysis: Growth, Decline and Middling Performance,” presents an opportunity for honest reflection on the progress made and areas requiring deeper reforms.

He said BudgIT has remained a vital civic partner in improving citizen access to public finance information, while the NGF continues to use such independent assessments to drive evidence-based dialogue on state performance.

According to him, the World Bank-supported States Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability (SFTAS) programme helped institutionalise budget credibility, debt transparency, and audit integrity, creating the data foundations that make such reports possible.

He added that the ongoing State Action on Business Enabling Reforms (SABER) programme is extending the reform frontier beyond fiscal transparency to improving the business climate at the subnational level.

Shittu said both programmes demonstrate what can be achieved when incentives, data, and collaboration align between government, civil society, and development partners.

He emphasized that transparency is not an end in itself but a continuous journey. “Each state faces unique fiscal realities. What matters is refining data, improving dialogue, and strengthening mutual accountability,” he said.

The NGF, he added, will continue to provide a platform for peer learning and engagement among states, while partnering with civil society to sustain fiscal reforms.

He congratulated BudgIT on the 10th anniversary of the State of States report and commended development partners for their consistent support to subnational governance reforms.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reaffirmed its commitment to supporting fiscal transparency and governance reforms in Nigeria, describing sound fiscal management as a cornerstone of effective service delivery and inclusive growth.

Speaking on behalf of the Foundation’s Country Director, Mr. Uche Amaonwu, at the launch of BudgIT’s 2025 State of States report in Abuja, Deputy Director for Program Advocacy and Communications, Ekenem Isichei, commended BudgIT for a decade of promoting accountability in public finance.

Amaonwu praised the State of States report as one of Nigeria’s most credible measures of subnational fiscal health, noting that it has evolved beyond rankings to highlight how governance decisions directly impact citizens. 

He said the 2025 edition, themed “Growth, Decline, and Middling Performance,” reflects the uneven progress across Nigeria’s 36 states and underscores that fiscal performance is ultimately a question of governance — about how decisions are made, resources are managed, and people are served.

He linked the Foundation’s partnership with BudgIT to its broader goal of improving health outcomes through stronger fiscal discipline. Good governance and sound fiscal systems, he said, ensure that budgeted health funds reach the frontline, that facilities are staffed, medicines are available, and mothers and children receive quality care. 

According to him, subnational fiscal management directly influences the success of public health campaigns against diseases such as polio, malaria, and measles, and determines the effectiveness of healthcare delivery at the primary level.

Amaonwu urged states to strengthen public financial management practices such as budget profiling, cash forecasting, and post-mortem budget reviews to ensure better fiscal outcomes. 

He cited Kaduna State’s coordination between its budget and health ministries as evidence that governance-centered transparency delivers results. 

Closing his remarks, he emphasized that fiscal transparency is not an end in itself but a means to ensure every naira allocated to health, education, and human capital delivers real impact. “Fiscal health is human health,” he said. “When governance is transparent and accountable, it becomes the bridge that connects both.”

• By Tunde Jacobs

BudgIT Foundation, a Lagos-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), has made a name for itself by using information technology tools to render national and state budgets in a format that makes them easy to understand, by ordinary people, across literacy bands. As part of its work, the low membership organisation uses part of the huge funds it gets, from individuals and foreign donor agencies, to publish what it calls State Fiscal Transparency League (SFTL) reports. These periodic reports, among other things, rank the 36 states based on their supposed level of compliance with basic financial reporting standards.

In its 2023 fiscal transparency league table, BudgIT placed Sokoto state in the 13th position. Stakeholders in the Sokoto state project were tempted to celebrate this ranking as an epic achievement. It looked really significant that the administration of Dr Ahmad Aliyu Sokoto, which assumed office in the middle of the year, without the benefit of proper hand-over note from its predecessor, could rate better than 26 other states in the area of budget transparency. On a second thought, they wisely ignored the BudgIT ranking, knowing that having the  state budget details dressed up in colourful charts, and hoisted on the internet, would  not add extra value to the budget or to the  lives of  the people of the Seat of the Caliphate.

Indeed, a creative presentation of budget informatics by skillful ICT experts amounts to nothing more than a publicity stunt. It does not enhance the effectiveness of budget execution, nor does it monitor the actual impact of public expenditure patterns on the living standards of people. While not denying the need for increased citizens’ participation in the formulation and execution of government budgets in a democracy, one is tempted to conclude that BudgIT’s undue emphasis on beautiful display of budget details online, is a misplaced priority, rather like rating mere appearance above the substantive economic and social objectives of public expenditure profiles. 

Perhaps, because Sokoto state did not roll out the drums to celebrate its positive fiscal transparency ranking in 2023, the BudgIT crew “felt offended” and decided to take the state to the cleaners. This appears to be the only logical explanation for the dramatic reversal of fortunes, which saw Sokoto state falling from the 13th position in 2023, to the very last position (36th), in the 2024 third quarter BudgIT rankings, a drastic fall that unfairly projected Sokoto as the worst performing state in fiscal transparency index,which is far from the reality.

Key  stakeholders in the Sokoto project, who have  the right to ask questions are baffled.  What really went wrong in the few months between the last quarter of 2023, and the third quarter of 2024,that prompted the BudgIT team to slam Sokoto State  with an abysmal indexing; the undeserved punishment that provided a launching pad for rabble rousers in the social media space to throw mud, and cast aspersion, on the state and its transformational leaders.

Justifying why the state deserved to be scandalized in the fiscal transparency league table, the BudgIT operatives explained that: “though Sokoto state achieved perfect score in areas such as the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), and Approved Budget, it faced challenges in key areas like revenue repository, audit transparency, and the e-procurement portal. Additionally, its website with fiscal data repository showed room for improvement.”

This simply means that the financial reports the BudgIT team saw on the Sokoto state websites had not been updated at the due date. Nobody accused the government of violating the standard financial reporting framework in a manner that could remotely smack of irresponsible accounting or total lack of accountability.

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If the fiscal reports were not up to date, a more dignifying approach would have been to reach out to the state authorities and obtain the information needed to close out any gaps in the process.

But alas, BudgIT Country Director Gabriel Okeowo and his team of desktop researchers failed to seek  engagement with Sokoto, or any other state that seemed to have gaps in their fiscal transparency key indicators. They chose to sit behind the keyboards in their cosy offices at Yaba, Lagos, to accuse, judge and summarily convict Sokoto state government for the “crime” of failure to upload its budget details online. The summary conviction attracted the severe punishment of a scandalous ranking on the fiscal transparency league table, and the skewed write-up that portrayed hardworking political leaders in bad light.

Gladly, the reality on the ground in Sokoto state is totally different from the fictional negativity that BudgIT has tried to portray with its tendentious fiscal transparency chart. The fiscal responsibility credentials of the Sokoto state administration under Gov Ahmad Aliyu Sokoto quite evident and unequalled. This can be seen from the fact that the government delivered over  186 impactful infrastructural projects in the 18 months; honoured all its obligations to workers, retirees and creditors, and has sustained critical social welfare programmes for its citizens, all this without ever approaching any commercial bank for a loan facility.

Any government that can faithfully and aggressively pursue its campaign programmes, and meet its obligations, without increasing taxes on its people or dragging into the quicksand of debt, does not need nebulous transparency tutorials from any NGO on how to dress up budget data, and when to upload fiscal informatics on the internet.

NGO’s should cultivate a proper view of their role in a democracy. In the specific case of BudgIT, it would be a fallacy of over simplification to assume that mere publication of budget fundamentals would guarantee that government expenditure patterns aligned with the most critical needs, or the wishes, of the people.

Let us take the example of Ebonyi state that placed second in the latest BudgIT ranking. This very state had budget N13 billion to renovate the runway of a brand new Airport that was constructed at the whopping cost of N53 billion. Since its inauguration, the residents say that no single commercial flight had landed in the colourful Ebonyi airport, making it look like a veritable white elephant.  Yet, another huge chunk of public funds is being spent to reconstruct its runway.

Ebonyi  state proudly perches at the second position in the BudgIT fiscal transparency league table, while  our dear Sokoto state was crucified for  more judicious use of its own resources.

At this point, it would be proper to remind BudgIT and other self-appointed messiah NGO’s that no government is obliged to do their bidding. In the specific case of Sokoto state, the ultimate judges of the government are the electorates who entrusted it with the mandate to manage the state’s resources; and the public accounts committee of the Sokoto State House of Assembly. These bodies  have the constitutional power of appropriation, to receive audited accounts report of the state government and to raise audit queries when necessary.

The NGO’s should be more circumspect about what they publish,to avoid compounding social problems or even creating new ones. Periodic publication of skewed and tendentious information in the public space can have deleterious effects on the national and sub- national governments, and on the political careers of their victims.

The electorate in Sokoto state sees the mischievous poor ranking of the state in the BudgIT 2024 fiscal transparency index as willful de-marketing exercise, an expression of unwarranted aggression, which is injurious to the collective good of the state and its able leadership. Moreover, disinformation is akin to cyber bullying, which is a crime in most countries of the world, including Nigeria. 

Clearly the people do not expect the  governor to channel scarce resources in the direction of dressing up budget informatics in the most appealing manner, just so he can satisfy the demand of BudgIT Foundation, which appears to place emphasis on how the budget looks on the internet, over and above the goals and actual achievements of public expenditures.

The  government of Dr. Ahmad Aliyu Sokoto should continue to focus on the many good things it is doing to advance education, build and maintain roads, expand water supply, promote agriculture, improve access to healthcare, and the creative use of agro-forestry to protect the environment while producing food and cash crops, among other things listed in the now famous nine-point agenda.

 The delivery of 186 impactful projects in 18 months is more important to the good people of Sokoto state than dressing up budget data for colourful display on the internet.