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AdvoKC Foundation is renewing its call on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to assent to the Federal Audit Service Bill, nearly two months after the Foundation first wrote directly to the Presidency and issued a public appeal on the same subject. Since then, the file has grown thicker. The Bill has not moved.
The United States Department of State's 2026 fiscal transparency assessment, covering the 2025 calendar year, evaluated 139 governments and the Palestinian Authority against a minimum standard. Seventy-three met it. Nigeria did not, for the second year running.
Under the arrangement still in force, the Budget Office of the Federation sets the audit office's budget allocation, the Ministry of Finance controls when that budget is actually released, and the Federal Civil Service Commission, not the Auditor-General, manages recruitment, promotion, and discipline for its staff. The INTOSAI Mexico Declaration, the international benchmark the US assessment relies on, requires a supreme audit institution to hold sufficient financial and administrative autonomy to do its job independently. On the evidence of its own admitted practice, Nigeria's audit office holds none of the three levers, budget, funding release, or personnel, that such autonomy would require. The Federal Audit Service Bill is written to hand the office all three.
The consequences are not abstract. Lawmakers disclosed in February 2026 that only four per cent of the Auditor-General's approved 2025 capital allocation was actually released to the office, a shortfall severe enough that it could audit only five of Nigeria's roughly one hundred foreign missions in that cycle. An institution asked to safeguard the integrity of a budget running into tens of trillions of naira could not, in practice, extend its own oversight past a handful of embassies. That is what "starved of resources" looks like on a balance sheet, and it is precisely the dependency on other agencies for funding release that the Bill would end.
What should concentrate attention in the Villa is that the IMF and the US State Department did not coordinate their findings, examine the same data, or share a common methodology. One reviewed fiscal aggregates; the other assessed institutional transparency practice against a global benchmark. They arrived independently, at the same underlying diagnosis: Nigeria's public financial management lacks a credible, independent check, and the country already possesses a legislative remedy that a sitting President has simply not signed.
"When we wrote to the Presidency in July, we made the case on the numbers alone," said Habib Sheidu, Project Director of AdvoKC Foundation. "Two months on, the numbers have been joined by a second international verdict, by the Auditor-General's own account of what it cannot do without funding it doesn't control, and by a former Vice President turning this into a campaign issue. None of that required imagination. It only required watching what happens when a Bill both chambers have passed sits on a desk long enough."
AdvoKC Foundation reiterates the request it made in July: that President Tinubu assent to the Federal Audit Service Bill without further delay, and that, upon assent, he direct that the Federal Audit Board be constituted within ninety days, that a public timeline be set for appointing the Director-General of the Federal Audit Service, and that a plain-language summary of the law be published so that citizens can track its implementation rather than take it on faith.
