Featured, Politics
Despite over two decades of reforms, corruption has persisted in Nigeria due mainly to a complex interplay of systemic factors, including weak institutions, compromised governance structures, and deeply ingrained social norms.
By Goddy Ikeh
DESPITE the arduous task of tackling growing insecurity of lives and property, worsening poverty by millions of the citizens, unemployment, widespread corruption among others, the citizens are now confronting the growing budget credibility crisis and political corruption.
This new phase of national challenge was highlighted by the recent scandals involving billions of naira allocated to non-existent or fake agencies, suspicious royal palace construction provisions, and chronic implementation delays of budgetary allocations.
Although Nigerians have been expressing their doubts on how lawmakers have been handling the constituency allocations inserted annually by the lawmakers in both the national and state budgets, there was a public outcry after recent revelations that billions of naira in the national budget were routed to questionable or non-existent entities like the Peace Corps/PFIPC and unrelated institutional lines.
Apart from the ongoing investigations on illegal allocation made for non-existent entities like the PFIPC, some stakeholders and analysts have identifies some key factors of the Nigerian budget crisis.
For instance, they identified budget implementation failures as one of the challenges confronting the system and explained that while nominal budgets soar to ₦58.47 trillion for 2026 budget, actual cash backing for critical capital infrastructure and social services lags severely behind projections. They also added that the current administration is still executing some aspects of the 2024 and 2025 budgets in 2026 and wondered if that does not constitute an abuse of budget procedure and implementation.
Another aspect of the crisis is the opaqueness and padding in budgeting in the country which the analysts describe as systemic institutional opaqueness, duplication of active budgets and unverified line items as structural enablers for graft.
Although the National Assembly has started its investigations on the budget provision made for the non-existing parastatal in the 2026 budget and legal action taken on the matter by the federal government, some stakeholders, civil society organisations and the opposition political parties have condemned the budget crisis in the country.
Reacting to the budget crisis, some accountability groups like Tracka and BudgIT lambasted the federal government for prioritizing elite or fictitious projects over basic public welfare, while opposition figures and former party officials were quoted by some media reports as blaming the administration for the recurring fiscal scandals that make public finance appear “synonymous with fraud and corruption”.
But the Budget authorities have defended the process by arguing that the no money was disbursed to the illegal parastatal identified in the budget and that expenditure controls and screening mechanisms successfully flagged and blocked actual disbursements from reaching fraudulent allocations.
The Budget Office insisted that “not one kobo” was released to the controversial PEAC/PFIPC despite its ₦1.3 billion budget allocation and that statutory controls prevented such expenditure.
In a statement by the Assistant Director, Head, Information and Public Relations, Afolabi Falulu Olajuwon, the Budget Office said that although the National Assembly appropriated funds for PEAC/PFIPC in the 2026 Appropriation Act, the statutory conditions required for expenditure were never fulfilled.
The office maintained that appropriation by Parliament does not automatically authorise spending, noting that public funds can only be released after Financial Clearance, lawful recruitment, payroll enrolment, treasury warranting, cash backing and procurement approvals where necessary.
According to the BOF, none of those conditions was met in the case of PEAC/PFIPC.
It said no Financial Clearance was issued because key regulatory requirements remained outstanding, including confirmation by the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission on the council’s staffing and remuneration structure.
“There was therefore no Financial Clearance. There was no lawful recruitment. There was no payroll enrolment. There was no salary payment,” the Budget Office stated.
While the investigations and legal actions are going on the PEAC/PFIPC scandal, some critics are wondering what obligation does the federal government has in budgeting N22.15bn for the building of palaces in some states of the country which was also identified in the 2026 budget.
However, before the ‘political storm’ a new wave of corruption has been taking shape in Nigerian politics with the systemic normalization of graft, strategic political defections to evade accountability and the redirection of public resources through sophisticated financial schemes.
According to some critics, It is also manifested in systemic and institutional shifts. They claim that politicians now resort to defection, which shields politicians facing investigations or trial and they switch to the ruling party to automatically stall or drop legal cases. In many cases, kleptocracy is normalised as high-level graft is absorbed into everyday political survival, reducing the fear of anti-corruption bodies like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. This often leads to new financial scams as exploitation shifts toward macro-level maneuvers, including manipulations in foreign exchange regimes, tax waiver abuses and ghost-worker payroll fraud.
Unfortunately, the socio-economic impact usually result in drained resources as billions of dollars vanish annually from state coffers, starving critical infrastructure like power, healthcare and education. It also leads to erosion of trust, while public confidence in state institutions and governance continues to hit record lows.
And in global and regional corruption ranking, Nigeria is consistently ranked globally among the top quarter of most corrupt countries.
Nigeria is also ranked among the world’s 40 most corrupt countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index and 35th from bottom on the World Bank’s list of countries measured by their control of corruption. It ranks highly on all four metrics of corruption measured by The Unbundled Corruption Index, with ‘grand theft’ by political elites particularly dominant.
Within Africa, Nigeria ranks 33rd for overall governance out of 54 countries measured in the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), which takes into account various measures including anti-corruption mechanisms and how successful they have been. The IIAG places Nigeria well below the average for both the African continent and the region of West Africa.
When measured on the ‘Absence of Corruption in State Institutions’ specifically, the IIAG ranked Nigeria fifth from bottom of the 54 African countries measured.
Unfortunately, despite 25 years of attempts at reforms and the establishment of the anti-financial crimes commission and agencies like the EFCC, Nigeria still suffers from endemic corruption and this continues to undermine its democracy and economic growth.
A.I
July 29, 2026
Tags: Goddy Ikeh