​The budgetary ghost: How stalled disbursements are haunting 2026

The fiscal paralysis currently gripping the nation in early 2026 is the predictable result of a three-year traffic jam where the ghost of 2024 and the stalled machinery of 2025 have collided with the aspirations of the current year.

We find ourselves in a budgetary twilight zone where the government is attempting to execute three different financial cycles simultaneously, leading to a systemic breakdown in public service delivery.

At the heart of this crisis is the rollover trap. Because less than a quarter of the 2025 capital allocations were actually released by year-end, the 2026 fiscal roadmap is already cluttered with unfinished business from two years ago.

This isn't just an administrative delay, it is an economic delay tax that erodes the value of every naira budgeted. A road project initiated under 2024 pricing models simply cannot be completed with 2026 inflation-adjusted costs, leading to a landscape littered with abandoned sites and skeletal infrastructure that serves as a monument to fiscal indecision.

Furthermore, this stagnation has fractured the social contract. When budgets are passed with patriotic fanfare but the actual disbursements for healthcare, education, and social safety nets remain trapped in bureaucratic limbo, the budget ceases to be a policy tool and becomes a mere wish list.

This lack of execution signals a deeper revenue crisis, suggesting that the government is budgeting for wealth it does not possess, sacrificing capital development to maintain the heavy burden of debt servicing and recurrent overheads.

To move forward, the 2026 fiscal strategy must shift from announcement culture to completion culture. We cannot continue to layer new promises onto old debts.

The focus must remain ruthlessly narrowed on clearing the 2024 and 2025 backlogs before a single new project is commissioned. 

Without this discipline, the 2026 budget will suffer the same fate as its predecessors, a document that exists on paper but never touches the lives of the citizens it was designed to serve.