I first became conscious of the phrase “budget padding” under Buhari. Before then, it sounded like street slang. By 2016, it had become a household name, whispered in newsrooms, shouted on radio, and typed in angry caps across timelines. I still don’t know if economists coined it or if Nigeria invented it to describe the quiet art of illegal insertions into the budget, but I do know this: once you hear it, you never unhear it.
While evil cannot be used to legitimize another evil, the current attempt to frame the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the worst since the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914, especially amid the controversy around the “ghost agency” and fresh budget fraud allegations, feels like a one-sided narrative feeding on raw emotion. Political psychologist Irvin Janis called this “groupthink”. The dangerous consensus where dissent is silenced and feelings replace facts. What we are witnessing now is exactly that: emotions running hotter than the price of rice, the kind of collective anger that once turned against Jonathan’s PDP and was baptized as regional solidarity and a sacred calling. In that climate, stories get retold, numbers get exaggerated, villains are cast, and enemies are inherited like family heirlooms.
A post surfaced recently, shared even by otherwise respected voices: “only those benefitting from government, ex-convicts, bandits, drug addicts are APC supporters.” Thousands liked it. Some laughed. I asked, what about the millions who voted APC in 2015, 2019, and 2023? Were they all criminals? Silence. Because the answer would break the script.
Then came another voice, a speaker who swore repeatedly that since 1914 Nigeria had never seen a president as bad as BAT, and urged Nigerians to “take their fate in their hands” if he wins again. That is textbook incitement, using fear and paranoia to prime resistance against an outcome that has already been declared tragic in the public imagination. I replied, perhaps naively, that despite all the allegations, ASUU has not been on strike for a full year, and we have not seen the kind of recruitment embargo that made government adverts disappear for years. Besides, Abacha, Jonathan, Buhari, Shagari, IBB… each at some point wore the crown of “worst president ever.” History has a short memory and a loud mouth.
The tension rising in the country is not only about the cost of foodstuffs. It is about politics, and about wild emotions that cannot guarantee security. Sociologist Gustav Le Bon warned a century ago that crowds think in images, not arguments, and are easily swayed by repetition and exaggeration. That is why we need opinions that dilute subjectivism, that resist the seduction of absolute truth born from negative emotion. That is why a post attributed to Senator Shehu Sani struck me as patriotic.
Senator Shehu Sani said what many avoided saying: “You Kept Quiet Under Buhari, Don’t Blame Tinubu Alone.” Speaking in a viral video, Sani criticized northerners for tolerating insecurity for years under Buhari because of religious, ethnic and sectional calculations, only to turn the volume up now. He accused opposition politicians of playing politics with blood, of celebrating attacks on schools or mocking soldiers. He reminded us that Nigeria is not alone. Chad, Mali, northern Cameroon are all bleeding, and asked why international partners have done so little, except the United States. His conclusion was simple and uncomfortable: put politics aside, support the government, stand with the armed forces.
And yes, the case of budget fraud and the ghost agency is being rewritten with absolutism. But let us not pretend this is new. I first heard “budget padding” as a scandal under Buhari. Under that administration from 2015 to 2023, it became a recurring theatre between the Executive and the National Assembly. In 2016, President Buhari said the budget returned to him was “completely different” and “embarrassing.” Former House Appropriation Chairman Abdulmumin Jibrin alleged that Speaker Yakubu Dogara and four others inserted personal projects. Figures flew: N40 billion, N280 billion, SERAP alleging N481 billion padded away. A Federal High Court even ordered prosecution and the publication of reports. In 2017, assent was delayed again over what was called a “perennial problem,” with about 4,000 new projects reportedly smuggled in and another court order to stop the alleged theft of N40 billion from zonal intervention funds.
By 2022, Buhari himself lamented at the signing ceremony that 10,733 projects had been reduced while 6,576 new ones appeared, including N36.59 billion for NASS projects in the Service-Wide Vote. He called it a violation of separation of powers but signed anyway. Outside the legislature, the ICPC found N18.39 billion in inflated personnel costs across 300 MDAs between 2017 and 2018, driven by sham, backdated recruitments. Three billion naira had already been shared and 59 directors were arrested. Analysts kept saying the same thing: these insertions made budgets un-implementable, and partly explained why, since 2000, our budgets have never been fully executed. Buhari vowed culprits would not go unpunished and admitted he had never heard “budget padding” before 2016.
If budget padding was the fiscal wound, IPPIS was the payroll bleeding. Introduced in 2017 to kill ghost workers, it became a new crime scene. In 2022 the EFCC arrested the Accountant-General Ahmed Idris over an alleged N80 billion fraud, and unions like COEASU said it vindicated their claim that IPPIS enabled “unilateral manipulations and cool fraud.” By 2021 the ICPC was probing a billion-naira salary syndicate where civil servants and IPPIS officials inflated grades. A Level 7 officer on N60,000 somehow earning N400,000.
The Head of Service revealed over 1,500 illegal recruitments in one year, with IPPIS allegedly infiltrated by a gang running ghost workers. NSA Babagana Monguno announced 54,000 fraudulent payroll entries uncovered through BVN validation. In universities, ASUU cried “bribe-for-salaries” and alleged massive fraud, with lecturers owed 15 to 16 months. The Senate and House launched probes. In one case, salaries meant for University of Agriculture, Makurdi staff ended up in accounts in Jigawa. Even in 2025, ICPC arraigned an official forging a posting letter to restore salary on IPPIS. The patterns were consistent: salary inflation, ghost workers, bribery for capturing, diversion of salaries. The OAGF promised a forensic audit. The government insisted IPPIS was “inevitable.”
This is not an attempt to exonerate the Tinubu government from the Femi Gbajabiamila and Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew scandal. On the contrary. I believe Gbajabiamila was caught, as academics would say, “with his pants down” in the alleged sex-for-grades matter. The SGF who allegedly wrote for office space for a phantom agency is also a suspect. People should be relieved of office the way Tinubu did with Betta Edu and some ministers. What goes around must come around. It is the only way to redeem credibility.
But we cannot fight one scandal by manufacturing another. We cannot cure budget fraud with mob justice, or answer IPPIS rot with sweeping generalizations that brand an entire voting bloc as criminals. Public opinion, as scholar Walter Lippmann noted, is shaped less by reality than by the pictures in our heads. Right now those pictures are being painted with the thickest brush. We need balance, tolerance, empathy, and memory. Because the moment we forget that padding was born under one administration, and fraud adapted under another, we become prisoners of the present, and democracies die that way.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
