After a very long delay, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) finally came up with its 2025 budget proposal. At a State House briefing, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Abubakar Atiku Bagudu announced a projected budget of N47.9 trillion. The budget will be presented to the National Assembly in the coming days, although a definite date has not been fixed. The National Assembly, which is still on an unscheduled break, is expected to resume sitting on Tuesday, November 19, after two weeks of recess.
The National Assembly had on October 30, adjourned sitting to, according to it, enable it attend to oversight responsibilities. The adjournment initially slated to last one week stretched to two weeks, reaching into the last weeks of the 2024 year. The sudden announcement of an ‘oversight break’ came to many National Assembly watchers as a surprise. In the preceding years of National Assembly sessions, the period of October right into December, has often been reserved for consideration of the national budget.
In keeping with the January to December budget cycle and in line with practice, the President was expected to present the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and the budget for the coming year at the beginning of the fourth quarter of the current year. What this means is that both the MTEF and the national budget for 2025 should have been presented to the National Assembly well before now.
Members of the National Assembly, on presentation of the budget were expected to begin hearings and budget defence drawing from the estimates of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of government, in the budget. Despite announcing the readiness of the budget, it has yet to go to the National Assembly, as no date has been fixed for its presentation – an embarrassing situation appearing to repeat the experience of 2023 when the budget was also presented late in November 2023. Even then, members did not have access nor copies of the full budget before they passed it into law just before the new year, with the President assenting to it on New Year’s day of 2024. This generated its own controversy, with several members accusing the leadership of the National Assembly of railroading them to passing a budget that they did not see.
Indeed, Senator Abdul Ningi escalated the controversy when he stated that the National Assembly may have passed two budgets, one of which was secret and padded the national budget by sums running into trillions of naira. He was suspended by the Senate for these comments after he found it difficult to elaborate on his allegations.
At this time, the country is currently running three budgets – the 2024 Appropriation Act and two supplementary budgets. It is unclear where the implementation of these three concurrently running budgets are. What is however clear, is that if the Tinubu administration was to be excused for the late presentation of the 2024 budget on the ground that it had just come into office, it is not clear now what the excuse can be.
Though the Minister of Budget has announced that the budget is ready and has given indications of some of its contents, what is certain is that like the 2024 budget, the 2025 budget is again late, and its history looks set to rhyme with its 2024 predecessor.