The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has faulted the 2026 Appropriation Bill presented to the National Assembly by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, describing it as a consolidation of fiscal recklessness and renewed wishful thinking.
The party said that, after a careful review of the budget proposal, it concluded that the document offers little beyond rising debt and deeper hardship for Nigerians.
“If approved, the only thing this budget is capable of sharing is more debts and greater misery in the years ahead,” the ADC said.
In a statement issued on Monday by its National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, the party argued that the 2026 budget merely replicated the templates of the “failed, unimplemented, and perhaps unimplementable” 2024 and 2025 budgets, and would likely suffer the same fate, with most of its execution deferred to another year.
Abdullahi said the proposal reflected “a government that attempts to build a house on quicksand,” noting that it was presented at a time when the 2025 budget had only just been repealed and re-enacted, a situation he described as “an unprecedented display of fiscal chaos and administrative incompetence.”
“Truth is, Nigeria is caught in a fiscal mess. But rather than confront the problems, the Tinubu administration has continued to kick the can down the streets, believing that they can continue to hide the yawning cracks under mountains of unsustainable debts that mortgages the future generation, while they continue to indulge in financial profligacy,” he said.
According to him, the administration had failed to grasp “a fundamental economic truth” that “no amount of monetary tinkering or central bank intervention can rescue an economy if the government refuses to embrace fiscal discipline and budget credibility.”
He further accused the government of attempting to run multiple budgets simultaneously due to what he called an inability to properly conclude previous fiscal cycles.
“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,” Abdullahi said.
He added that while governments may extend budget implementation periods or introduce supplementary budgets, “operating three or more national budgets simultaneously is President Tinubu’s original contribution to fiscal chaos. It has never happened before in this country.”
The ADC also criticised what it described as the administration’s habit of reducing fiscal planning to a hollow ritual that mocked the suffering of Nigerians.
“While revenues were pushed to N20 trillion in 2024, a figure driven more by the pains of currency devaluation than by genuine economic productivity, the government had the audacity to double its projections to N40 trillion for 2025 and even raising it to N58.57 trillion in 2026. This is not vision; it is fantasy,” the party said.
It described the 2026 budget as “dangerously scant on detail” and built on “yet another unsustainable expansion” with weak foundations.
“In an era where 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,” the statement said.
“Instead of adopting a conservative posture to shield the nation from global volatility, they chase a N34 trillion revenue target that is totally disconnected from reality, especially now that the artificial ‘bounce’ provided by the devaluation of the Naira has fully evaporated.
“We wonder if this government ever considers alternative scenarios, other than the one that favours their mind-set.”
The party said the most alarming aspect of the proposal was the scale of the deficit and what it suggested about the administration’s attitude towards future generations.
“This administration behaves as if after them, there would be no Nigeria anymore. A budget that plans to generate N34 trillion in revenue while borrowing N24 trillion is an admission of fiscal insolvency,” it said.
“In no sane or functional fiscal system would a deficit-to-revenue ratio of 70 percent be considered acceptable or even be contemplated at all.”
According to the ADC, the document submitted to the National Assembly last Friday was “a debt trap masquerading as a budget.”
Abdullahi noted that although the government proposed to spend N25.68 trillion on capital expenditure, the projected deficit of N23.85 trillion meant that most projects would be financed through borrowing.
“The government claims it will spend N25.68 trillion on capital expenditure, yet with a projected deficit of N23.85 trillion, it is clear that almost every single bridge, road, or project is being funded by high-interest debts,” he said.
“But it is even more alarming when the government borrows mindlessly to fund opaque and often frivolous expenditures. It is one thing to squander current revenues on the excesses of the state, but it is an unpardonable sin to raise massive debts to fund reckless spending, effectively burying our children under a mountain of debt obligations before they even enter the workforce.”
He added that the fundamentals of the 2026 budget reflected “a total abandonment of revenue credibility and deficit management,” warning that the consequences were already evident.
“Driven by the twin engines of devaluation and surging borrowing, Nigeria’s debt service costs have exploded from N12.63 trillion in 2024 to a projected and staggering N15.52 trillion in 2026,” Abdullahi said.
“There is no fiscal doctrine on earth that justifies a path of high deficits paired with such astronomical servicing costs.
“This administration has hit a wall, and it is clear that they are blinded by their own propaganda. The federal government of Nigeria is in desperate need of a new pair of eyes and a radical departure from this path of ruin to rebuild a fiscal structure that serves the people rather than just the creditors.”
