Nigeria Denies Operating 8.8 Trillion Naira Shadow Budget

The Nigerian government has dismissed allegations that it spent between ₦8 trillion and ₦8.83 trillion outside its approved budget, calling the claims a misrepresentation of an International Monetary Fund report. The controversy follows the IMF's 2026 Article IV Consultation Report, in which Resident Representative Christian Ebeke noted that approximately 2% of Nigeria's GDP in expenditure remained unreported in official budgets for 2025, potentially masking the true fiscal deficit.

Taiwo Oyedele, Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, rejected the notion of a shadow budget, asserting that all expenditures—including debt service, national security interventions, and multi-year infrastructure projects—follow the 1999 Constitution and National Assembly appropriations. He clarified that the IMF's observations concerned the timing and presentation of fiscal reporting rather than the legality of the spending, and challenged critics to provide evidence of specific projects executed without legal authority.

Opposition leaders Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi condemned the reported discrepancy, with Abubakar describing the spending as grand corruption and calling for investigations by the EFCC and ICPC. In response to the transparency concerns, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has requested the National Assembly to harmonize overlapping budgets into a single, unified framework.