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By Emma Njoku
AdvoKC Foundation, a youth-led civic-tech organisation committed to promoting transparency, democratic governance, and public participation in Nigeria, has called on President Bola Tinubu to assent, without further delay, to the Federal Audit Service Bill, which has now passed both chambers of the 10th National Assembly and awaiting presidential action for over seven months.
The Bill would repeal the colonial-era Audit Ordinance of 1956, an instrument that, by operation of the Revised Edition (Laws of the Federation of Nigeria) Decree of 1990, technically ceased to be part of Nigerian law and does not appear in either the 1990 or 2004 Laws of the Federation. In its place, the Bill would establish an autonomous Federal Audit Service and Federal Audit Board, expand the powers of the Auditor-General for the Federation, and, for the first time, attach real timelines and sanctions to a function that has so far relied on slow, largely administrative penalties.
“Right now, the Auditor-General can tell Nigerians where public money has gone missing, but has no dependable way of making anyone answer for it,” said Habib Sheidu, Project Director of AdvoKC Foundation. “That is the difference between a watchman and an enforcer. This Bill finally gives the office teeth. Every month it sits unsigned is a month in which that gap stays open.”
The call comes against the backdrop of the International Monetary Fund’s 2026 Article IV Consultation report on Nigeria, which found that capital spending equivalent to roughly two percent of GDP, in the region of N8.8 trillion, was executed outside the formal budget in 2025 and did not appear in official budget documents or implementation reports. In concluding that consultation, IMF executive directors highlighted concern over off-budget spending and complex financing instruments, and called for accelerating reforms to strengthen the budget process, public financial management, fiscal reporting, and accountability. The Fund’s staff report goes further, stating that timely passage of the budget and phasing out the practice of overlapping budgets would strengthen budget implementation, alongside a call to resume the regular publication of audited government accounts.
“The IMF report does not mention this Bill by name, but it does not need to,” Sheidu said. “It describes, almost line for line, the very reform this Bill would deliver: a budget process that runs on schedule, accounts that are reconciled and published as a matter of routine, and an audit institution with the independence to enforce that discipline. You cannot separate the mess of overlapping and re-enacted budgets from the absence of the audit law that would have caught the slippage before it required a repeal-and-re-enactment exercise to correct after the fact.”
AdvoKC Foundation noted that this is not the first time the reform has come this close.
“The Bill was first introduced in the 6th National Assembly between 2007 and 2011, and failed to scale through. The 7th National Assembly’s version failed to secure concurrence between the two chambers. The 8th National Assembly passed the Bill and transmitted it for assent in January 2019, and it lapsed, unsigned, with no reason ever communicated to the National Assembly. The 9th National Assembly’s fresh attempt did not complete the legislative process before that Assembly’s tenure ended in 2023.
“The version now before President Tinubu, introduced afresh in the 10th Assembly in October 2023 and passed by both chambers by December 2025, is therefore the fifth legislative attempt in almost two decades to give Nigeria a modern federal audit law, and only the second occasion on which it has reached a President’s desk.”
The Foundation also pointed to Section 58(4) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended), which gives the President 30 days to either assent to a Bill or communicate his reasons for withholding assent. The Bill has now been outstanding well beyond that window.
“Every additional week of silence gets read as ambivalence about reforms this administration says it champions,” Sheidu added.
“Signing this Bill costs nothing and buys a great deal: it tells the IMF, the World Bank and international investors that Nigeria’s fiscal reforms rest on institutions, not just announcements. And it tells Nigerians that a report from the Auditor-General will finally mean something.”
AdvoKC Foundation is urging the President to assent to the Bill immediately and, upon assent, to direct that the Federal Audit Board be constituted within 90 days, that a timeline be published for the appointment of the director general of the Federal Audit Service, and that a plain-language summary of the law be made public. The Foundation said it will track these milestones through its PromiseTracker.ng platform.
