By Eze Onyekpere
The Budget Office of the Federation (BOF) is charged inter alia with the responsibility of ensuring transparency and accountability in budgeting and federal government’s fiscal operations. In accordance with the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), the BOF is even at the centre of monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the annual budget, assessment of the attainment of fiscal targets and reporting thereon on a quarterly basis. However, the BOF seems to be abandoning the transparency aspect of its duties.
As at the 7th day of May 2025, the BOF deliberately failed, refused and neglected to upload the 2025 Appropriation Act to its website. The only document on the 2025 federal budget available on the website is the schedule to the Act which contains the details of the allocations to the various ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) of government. But the legal authorization for the expenditure being the Appropriation Act has been kept away from the public. Two schedules of the Appropriation Act have been uploaded to the BOF website – https://budgetoffice.gov.ng. The stamp mark indicating the date of upload of the schedules to the website reads March 19 2025 while the second reads March 25 2025.
By a freedom of information request from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), the organization brought to the notice of the BOF the fact that the Appropriation Act is not on their website. Before the FOI request, a visit to the BOF to get the Act and to remind them that it is not available to the public was met with an affirmation by the BOF that the document is on their site. However, they refused to be a party to opening the site to show exactly where they posted the Act. In response to the FOI, they gave CSJ an electronic copy of the Act and still refused to upload same to their website. This raises the poser on the rationale for the decision to keep the Appropriation Act away from the Nigerian public. Did any law or policy grant a discretionary power to BOF to decide on whether to withhold fiscal information from the public? The author is not aware of any such law or policy.
It is important to understand the nature of an Appropriation Act and the reason why it should be in the public sphere. It is that law resulting from the appropriation process provided in sections 81 and 121 of the 1999 Constitution at the federal and state levels respectively. The bill leading to the Act is usually prepared by the executive and approved by the legislature. Ideally, between the preparation by the executive and approval by the legislature, there should be opportunities for popular participation and citizens input into the process.Legislative hearings, memoranda submission to the executive, etc., should be part of the process. Pray, the public that participated in the process leading up to the conversion of the bill into an Act have every reason to see the outcome of the process in which they participated.
What emerges from the appropriation process is an authorization to spend public funds, to raise revenue and the conditions and formalities precedent and contingent issues for the budget. Thus, there is a broad definition of the respective expenditure categories, details of the fiscal terms guiding the budget and sometimes, it contains the basic assumptions and key macroeconomic indicators. A typical Appropriation Act contains the following vis, authority to spend a specific sum of money within a specific tenure – usually the financial year stipulated by law, release of funds from the consolidated revenue fund, procurement and due process certification, virement, excess revenue, information to be submitted by the executive to the legislature on internally generated revenue, domestic or foreign assistance, etc. Furthermore, it contains the details of the fiscal framework in terms of sources of revenue, whether the budget is surplus or deficit, debts and borrowing, deductions, aids and grants.It therefore contains important information from the approved medium-term expenditure framework which undergirds the budget. The schedule(s) to the Act are the budget details which most Nigerians refer to as the budget.
In the light of the foregoing, this is not a document that should be hidden from the public because it is the basis of public revenue and expenditure and the authorization given by the legislature to the executive for resources to execute development projects, maintain law and order and take charge of issues that affect everyday life in a country.
Also, in accordance with the FRA, annual budget estimates and the Appropriation Bill from the executive to the legislature should be accompanied by measures on cost, cost control and evaluation of results of programmes financed with budgetary resources and a Fiscal Risk Appendix evaluating the fiscal and other related risks to the annual budget and specifying measures to be taken to offset the occurrence of such risks. Measures on cost and cost control should be prescribed in the Appropriation Act while measures to be taken to offset the occurrence of identified fiscal risks should also be part of the approved AppropriationAct. These measures re-echo now that the key assumptions of the 2025 budget and fiscal reality are at cross roads. The benchmark price and the daily production quota are at variance with the oil industry reality. From the Appropriation Act available to the author, no provision was made by either the executive or legislature on any of these demands of the FRA.
BOF is hereby called upon to immediately upload the Appropriation Act to its website. This deliberate attempt to deny Nigerians of their right to know is a gross violation of the provisions of the Constitution and the FRA and should not be allowed to continue for a day longer. If the individuals charged with the responsibility of pushing out this information to the public are unwilling to perform this duty, there is only one option left or them – they should resign.