Three years, one ledger: How Bagudu steadied Nigeria’s budget machine

From a restored January-December budget cycle to a ward-level development push, the Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Senator Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, has leaned on decades of fiscal experience to reshape a ministry once known mainly for delay. BENJAMIN UMUTEME writes.

Three years after he was handed one of the most technical portfolios in President Bola Tinubu’s cabinet, Senator Abubakar Atiku Bagudu has turned the Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning into one of the more visible engines of the administration’s economic reform agenda, according to a review of the ministry’s record since August 2023.

Appointed Minister of Budget and Economic Planning on August 21, 2023, Bagudu arrived at a ministry whose core job: turning policy into appropriated, monitored spending rarely makes headlines until it fails.

Three years on, officials and independent observers point to a run of measurable outcomes: a budget cycle restored to predictability, a revised national development framework, a citizen-facing project-tracking tool, and a rebased set of national accounts that analysts had demanded for years.

A round peg in a round hole

Bagudu’s qualifications for the brief were not in question when he was appointed. A 1983 Economics graduate of Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, he holds a Master’s Degree in Money and Banking from the University of Jos and a second Master’s in International Affairs, with a specialisation in Economic Policy Management, earned as a World Bank scholar at Columbia University’s Program in Economic Policy Management in 1992.

He had also sat on the other side of the budget table, first as a special assistant to the Minister of National Planning under the Babangida administration, then as a two-term senator representing Kebbi Central between 2009 and 2015, and finally as Governor of Kebbi State from 2015 to 2023, where he oversaw the state’s own budgeting and development planning for eight years.

That combination of legislative, executive and technical experience has shaped his approach to the ministry’s two hardest jobs: getting budgets passed on schedule, and getting the money spent afterward tracked properly.

Defending the reforms

Bagudu’s tenure opened alongside the most disruptive economic decisions of the Tinubu administration — the removal of the petrol subsidy and the unification of the foreign exchange windows. Both triggered public anger over rising costs. As one of the government’s chief economic spokesmen, Bagudu repeatedly defended the measures as necessary to reposition Nigeria for investment inflows and sustainable growth, urging Nigerians to bear with the administration as the reforms matured.

That defence has run alongside a steady stream of data the ministry says backs the argument: officials point to foreign reserves climbing past $50 billion, providing more than eleven months of import cover, and to a first-quarter 2026 capital importation figure of $10.37 billion, an 83.8 percent jump on the corresponding period in 2025.

Fixing the calendar first

The most immediately visible achievement of Bagudu’s ministry was procedural rather than programmatic: the restoration of the January-to-December budget cycle.

He successfully negotiated the 2024 Appropriation Bill through the National Assembly in time for President Tinubu to sign it into law on January 1, 2024, ending years of budgets that spilled deep into the fiscal year they were meant to cover.

The pattern has held since.

Alongside that, the ministry negotiated the passage of the 2023 Supplementary Budgets and the 2024 Budget Amendments, channeling funds toward security, infrastructure, agricultural interventions, wage awards for public servants, and credit support for micro, small and medium enterprises.

Observers of the process have credited Bagudu’s years in the Senate with helping the negotiations move with less of the friction that has historically slowed budget passage.

Rewriting the development plan

Beyond annual budgeting, Bagudu’s ministry has led the revision of Nigeria’s National Development Plan for 2021 to 2025, aligning it with the Renewed Hope Agenda and the administration’s eight priority areas. A successor plan covering 2026 to 2050 is close to completion.

The ministry has also driven the Renewed Hope Ward Development Plan, an initiative designed to push economic growth down to the country’s 8,809 wards by mapping and supporting the dominant economic activity in each.

More than 10 million economically active Nigerians are expected to benefit once the plan, now in its implementation phase following approval by the National Economic Council and the President, is fully rolled out.

A related initiative, the cassava bio-ethanol value chain concession negotiated with the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, has created more than 8,000 direct and indirect jobs across projects spanning all six geopolitical zones.

Cleaning up the numbers

Perhaps the most technically significant achievement under Bagudu’s supervision has been the overhaul of Nigeria’s statistical infrastructure. The National Bureau of Statistics, working under the ministry, rebased the country’s Gross Domestic Product and Consumer Price Index to reflect economic activity that had gone uncounted for years, including newer digital and informal-sector activity.

The Bureau has since kept to a consistent monthly release schedule for inflation data, giving businesses a more reliable basis for planning than they had in the years before the rebasing.

That data discipline extends to trade and other economic indicators, which officials say are now released on a predictable timetable — a shift from years in which delayed statistics left policymakers and investors working from stale numbers.

Accountability tools

To back up the spending side of the ledger, the ministry deployed the Eyemark application, which allows members of the public to track and give feedback on more than 500 federally funded capital projects. The ministry has also pushed the use of geospatial data and spatial analysis in project planning, aiming for a more even distribution of infrastructure across Nigeria’s geopolitical zones — an approach meant to reduce the perception, common in past administrations, that budgetary allocations favoured particular regions.

The ministry’s disbursement record extends to the states: through the State Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability programme and NG-CARES, it has overseen the reimbursement of the 34 states and the Federal Capital Territory with hundreds of billions of naira in local economic recovery grants, alongside a revised National Social Protection Policy meant to sharpen targeted cash transfers, conditional grants for nano-businesses, and safety nets for vulnerable households.

What independent observers say

The Initiative for Transparent Leadership, a civil society organisation focused on public accountability, has publicly commended the ministry’s record on regional balance in budgetary allocation.

Speaking at a press conference, the group’s Executive Director, Fabian Opialu, said that under Bagudu’s leadership, the budget follows an even spread, ensuring that all six geopolitical zones benefit from concrete projects that meet tangible realities on the ground, a departure from the pattern in previous administrations where some regions were favoured over others.

“This level of accountability is unprecedented,”he said, and highlights Bagudu’s commitment to transparency in governance.

Political economist and public affairs analyst Adefolarin Olamilekan offered a similar assessment of the ministry’s three-year record, describing it as reflecting a sustained effort to strengthen economic policy coordination, fiscal planning and development strategy in Nigeria.

He said Bagudu’s tenure has been “marked by commitment, intellectual capacity, foresight and a clear understanding of the complexities confronting the Nigerian economy.”

While significant structural challenges remain, Olamilekan said “the minister’s contribution to policy formulation and national planning demonstrates a commitment to using economic governance as an instrument for improving citizens’ welfare, strengthening institutions and creating the conditions for sustainable growth.”

Going forward, he said, the ministry must move beyond policy formulation to a stronger emphasis on implementation, monitoring and measurable economic outcomes. Its mandate, he argued, “should be deepened through better coordination between national plans, annual budgets and sectoral policies, while strengthening data-driven planning, fiscal discipline and accountability for public expenditure.”

Adefolarin added that the ministry should take a more active role in aligning government investment with job creation, productivity, infrastructure development, private-sector growth and poverty reduction. Ultimately, he said, Nigeria needs a planning system where policies are not only well conceived but effectively implemented, continuously evaluated and directly linked to improvements in living standards and broad-based economic prosperity.

That praise sits alongside a more cautious reading from economists tracking Nigeria’s overall fiscal position. Independent analysts, including at the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise and Financial Derivatives Company, have flagged the scale of debt servicing in successive federal budgets as a persistent constraint on capital spending, even as revenue projections have improved; a reminder that the ministry’s planning wins have unfolded against a fiscal backdrop that leaves little room for missteps on borrowing.

The balance sheets

Three years in, the picture that emerges from the ministry’s own record is one of a technocrat-politician using legislative know-how to smooth the budget process, and a planning apparatus that has become noticeably more data-driven and citizen-facing than before his appointment.