If wasteful spending were a sport, the Nigerian National Assembly would be world champions by a landslide. With the 2025 budget insertions recently revealed by BudgIT Nigeria, it is evident that our lawmakers are not just writing cheques—they’re scripting a national tragedy of greed, waste, and misguided priorities. The figures don’t just insult our intelligence—they spit in the face of suffering citizens.
Let’s begin with the most dazzling of them all—1,477 streetlights costing a jaw-dropping N393.29 billion. That’s about N266 million per light. One can’t help but ask: are we installing mini-suns or building altars of corruption in the name of illumination? With such a budget, Nigeria should not only be the Light of Africa; we ought to be the literal Light of the World. This isn’t governance. It’s daylight robbery packaged in LED bulbs.
Streetlights, boreholes, and ICT projects have now become the holy trinity of budget padding in Nigeria. Like clockwork, every year, they appear in mind-boggling volumes, fattened with ludicrous price tags. The 2025 budget carries 538 boreholes costing N114.53 billion. That’s over N212 million per borehole—a figure that suggests these boreholes may be tapping into the Garden of Eden, not underground water.
But it gets even more bizarre. There are 2,122 ICT projects worth N505.79 billion—a staggering figure in a country where basic computer literacy is still a luxury in many schools. It’s an irony too cruel to ignore. Nigeria’s digital divide is widening, yet we’re throwing half a trillion naira at phantom tech projects that will never see the light of day. At this rate, we’re not building a digital future—we’re burying it in inflated contracts.
The National Assembly’s insertions in the budget are not just excessive; they are grotesque. They have turned MDAs (Ministries, Departments, and Agencies) into project warehouses, bloated with projects they neither requested nor can deliver. For instance, the Federal Co-operative College, Oji River was handed 1,142 projects worth N320 billion. That’s not budgeting—it’s a heist dressed in legislative robes.
Even more laughable is the Nigerian Building and Road Research Institute, now saddled with 856 projects amounting to N406 billion. These are not institutes anymore; they’ve become budget laundromats where inflated contracts are washed clean of scrutiny and soaked in corruption.
One must ask: Where is the planning? Where is the integrity? The Federal College of Horticulture, Gombe, supposedly tasked with grooming farmers, now has 635 projects worth N181.74 billion. That’s more than some states receive in federal allocations. What exactly is being cultivated—vegetables or venality?
In Ibadan, the Federal Co-Operative College received 317 projects for N190.89 billion. A college now turned into a contractor’s paradise. These are schools in name only—on paper, they build; in reality, they rot. Education, ironically, has become a backdoor for looting.
Let’s not forget the 254 projects for N83.65 billion inserted into the budget of the National Centre for Agricultural Mechanisation in Ilorin. In a country where farmers still use hoes and cutlasses, this smells more like mechanized plundering than agricultural development.
Or take the Nigeria Institute of Oceanography and Marine Research, a specialized agency, now weighed down with 161 projects worth N78.98 billion. What does marine research have to do with building boreholes or roads in landlocked communities? This is budgeting gone rogue—a square peg slammed into a triangular hole.
And what about health and education—the supposed priorities of any serious government? The 2025 budget allocates N179.96 billion for 561 education projects and N420.09 billion for 319 health projects. At first glance, these seem impressive until you realize these are just sugar coatings over poisoned apples. The execution of these projects will follow the same old Nigerian pattern—half-built, substandard, abandoned.
Meanwhile, 43 Community Town Halls will gulp N17.23 billion, and 32 Traditional Ruler Empowerment Projects will consume another N6.74 billion. While traditional institutions deserve respect, they are fast becoming tools for political appeasement, not community development.
The sheer scale of road projects—1,380 projects costing N1.44 trillion—should ordinarily inspire hope. But here in Nigeria, roads are not built to last; they are built to be rebuilt. It’s a classic rinse-and-repeat cycle of decay, conveniently profitable for politically connected contractors.
Even 24 security vehicles come with an N11.7 billion price tag. That’s nearly N488 million per vehicle—perhaps armored with gold or equipped with teleportation capabilities? In a nation battling insecurity, these figures don’t just fail to reassure—they aggravate the trauma.
Ultimately, the 2025 budget is not a plan for development. It is a budget of absurdities, a script of fiscal malpractice performed by a cabal of political elites who have turned Nigeria’s finances into a personal ATM. This is not governance—it’s legalized looting under parliamentary approval.
It’s high time we called this what it is: a theatre of public deception, where budgets are padded with fantasy figures while hospitals remain empty, schools dilapidated, and the masses groan under the weight of poverty. A nation that lights its streets with gold while its children read in darkness has lost its moral compass.
Nigerians must rise, not with apathy, but with anger—the righteous kind that fuels revolutions of thought and action. BudgIT Nigeria has held up a mirror. What we do with the reflection is up to us. Shall we continue to look away, or finally, hold the architects of this fiscal travesty accountable? The time to choose is now.
Stanley Ugagbe is a Social Commentator. He can be reached via stanleyakomeno@gmail.com
