Release Of Funds To MDAs

In the 2025 fiscal year, the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare received just N36 million out of a total capital allocation of N218 billion. The Ministry of Livestock Development got nothing at all from its ₦10 billion capital vote. The Ministry of Solid Minerals Development? Zero. The Ministry of Transportation managed about 1%of its N256.7 billion allocation.

In our opinion, these are not rounding errors. They represent a systematic failure of governance so profound that it calls into question whether Nigeria’s annual budgeting exercise is anything more than an elaborate performance staged for public consumption.

That these revelations surfaced during 2026 budget-defence hearings at the National Assembly, rather than proactive disclosure by the executive, makes the situation worse. Ministers and agency heads sat before legislators and, almost casually, reported that the capital budgets approved by those same legislators had been rendered meaningless.

The Independent Corrupt Practices Commission received its N449 million capital release on November 28, barely five weeks before the fiscal year ended. The Ministry of Women Affairs received N394 million in December but was unable to spend it. An anti-corruption agency that cannot fund its own operations because money arrives too late to procure anything is not a serious institution. It is a punchline.

The federal government’s own 2025 Appropriation Act Implementation Guideline explains, in bureaucratic language, how this dysfunction operates by design. Capital releases, the Budget Office stated, would follow a “bottom-up cash management” approach. MDAs were required to submit monthly expenditure plans to both the Budget Office and the Office of the Accountant General by July 31, 2025. Disbursements would then be “derived from expenditure plans” and tied to a monthly Federal Government cash plan that the Minister of Finance had to sign off on before any procurement could proceed.

On top of this, the 2025 Budget Call Circular introduced a requirement that projects above N150 million include geo-tagging coordinates as a prerequisite for capital releases.

On paper, this architecture sounds like rational cash management tied to planning and compliance requirements to ensure accountability. In practice, it has produced a system in which appropriation means nothing, and the executive retains absolute discretion over whether agencies receive funds to do their work. The National Assembly appropriates. The executive withholds. And Nigerians suffer the consequences.

Consider the implications in healthcare alone. A country battling Lassa fever outbreaks, struggling with polio vaccination resistance in parts of the North, and recording some of the worst maternal and infant mortality rates on the continent, released 0.016 per cent of the health ministry’s capital budget. What hospitals were built with N36 million?

What medical equipment was procured? What disease surveillance infrastructure was strengthened? The answer, obviously, is none. The appropriation was a fiction, and the release, if it can be called that, was an insult.

The pattern is not confined to health. Across the MDAs where data is available, the same story repeats. The Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy received ₦202 million from a revised capital budget of ₦ 3.53 billion. The South East Development Commission reportedly received zero capital releases throughout 2025, with a ₦5 billion allocation arriving only in late December under unclear classification. These are agencies with mandates that affect the food security of millions of Nigerians, mineral resource development, regional development, and transportation infrastructure, operating on budgets that exist only in gazette form.

The deeper problem here is structural. Nigeria operates a budgeting system where appropriation and release exist in parallel universes. The National Assembly goes through months of deliberation, public hearings, committee work and political horse-trading to pass a budget. The president signs it into law. And then the executive treats the law as advisory. Capital votes become wish lists. Release becomes a discretionary gift, subject to cash availability and bureaucratic compliance hurdles.

This is not how a serious country manages public finance. In functional democracies, appropriation carries the force of law. Governments that cannot release funds in accordance with legislative mandates face consequences, such as parliamentary censure, votes of no confidence, and electoral punishment. In Nigeria, ministers report zero releases to the same legislators who approved those budgets, and the hearing moves on to the next agenda item.

The National Assembly bears significant responsibility here. Legislators who appropriate funds they know the executive has no intention of releasing are complicit in the deception. If budget-defence hearings consistently reveal that capital releases hover between 0% and 6%, then the entire appropriation process needs fundamental reform.

At minimum, the legislature should require quarterly release reports from the Budget Office, enforceable timelines for capital disbursements, and statutory consequences for executive noncompliance with appropriation law.

The cash-management framework itself must be re-examined. A system that requires ministerial sign-off on monthly cash plans before any procurement can begin is a system built for delay.

In our view, if the federal government lacks the revenue to fund the budgets it signs into law, it should say so openly and present budgets that reflect fiscal reality. If the cash-management architecture is designed to give the executive veto power over legislative appropriations, it violates the separation of powers and should be dismantled.

And if MDAs are failing to meet compliance requirements that would trigger releases, then those requirements should be publicly reported alongside the release data so that Nigerians can judge for themselves where the blame lies.

What cannot continue is the current arrangement where budgets are announced to great fanfare, capital votes are appropriated in trillions of naira, and agencies responsible for health, security, infrastructure and development operate on near-zero funding while nobody is held accountable. That is not cash management. It is governance by fiction.