Imagine you send your brother money to pay your child's school fees. Weeks pass, then months. When you finally ask for the receipt, he tells you the school extended the payment deadline, so there's no rush to show you anything. Would that explanation satisfy you? Or would you want to know, right now, exactly what happened to your money?
That, in plain terms, is the question AdvoKC Foundation put to Nigeria's National Assembly this year. On 8 July 2026, we got an answer that matters to every Nigerian who has ever wondered why the "budgeted" road, clinic, or scholarship never seems to arrive.
Every three months, the Budget Office of the Federation is legally required to tell the National Assembly exactly how the federal budget is being spent: how much revenue came in, how much was spent, how much debt was serviced. This isn't a courtesy. It's the law. Section 30(1) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 gives the Budget Office just 30 days after each quarter to submit this report.
Think of it as the government's bank alert, the message that should land almost immediately after money moves, so the people watching over that money (in this case, our lawmakers, on our behalf) can catch problems early: money meant for hospitals sitting unused, contractors paid without work done, debts piling up faster than revenue.
But that alert stopped coming. The report for July to September 2025 (Q3 2025) was due by 31 October 2025. It didn't show up until May 2026, over six months late. As of the July 2026, the reports for October to December 2025 (Q4 2025) and January to March 2026 (Q1 2026) still hadn't been submitted at all.
It's easy to hear "budget performance report" and switch off. But this delay is the difference between the National Assembly catching a problem in real time and finding out about it two years later, when the money is already gone.
It means lawmakers have been approving new borrowing, new spending, and new revenue plans for 2026 without first seeing the full picture of what happened to 2024 and 2025's money. It means the "budget" you hear announced every December, the one with your community's promised borehole, road, or health centre line item, can quietly go unimplemented for years, with no public reckoning, because the very report that would expose the gap is the one that's missing.
This is the same gap our Promise Tracker NG platform exists to close: showing citizens not just what was promised, but what was actually delivered.
On 3 June 2026, AdvoKC Foundation wrote directly to the two lawmakers with the power to force this issue: Hon. James Faleke, Chairman of the House Committee on Finance, and Sen. Mohammed Sani Musa, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance.
Our message was simple and specific:
In short: no more new spending requests until the old ones are accounted for.
Letters to the National Assembly matter, but they mean little if ordinary Nigerians never learn what's at stake. So alongside our formal advocacy, we ran a sustained social media campaign that doubled as public enlightenment: breaking down what the Fiscal Responsibility Act actually requires, what a "budget performance report" is, and why a six-month delay in Abuja affects the borehole that still hasn't been dug in someone's village.
These weren't one-off posts. They were part of a deliberate strategy to keep public attention on the issue, so that lawmakers knew citizens were watching, and so that citizens understood exactly what they were owed. Enlightenment and pressure, working together.On 8 July 2026, a little over a month after our letters landed on the desks of both Finance Committee chairmen, and after weeks of sustained public pressure online, the 10th House of Representatives announced a new Ad Hoc Committee on the Delayed Releases and Lack of Funding for the Budgets of 2024, 2025 and 2026, to be chaired by Hon. Abubakar Kabir Abubakar.
We won't claim single handed credit for a decision the House makes on its own timeline. But the sequence speaks for itself: a specific, evidence-based demand for accountability, amplified by public enlightenment that kept citizens informed and engaged, followed within weeks by the creation of a dedicated committee to investigate exactly the failure we flagged: three years of budgets, not accounted for.
Just as the House committee was taking shape, the pressure for answers spread to the Senate, too. On Monday, 20 July 2026, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, appeared before the Senate Committee on Finance for an interactive economic review session.
The session was prompted by growing public anxiety and by concerns lawmakers themselves had raised over reports circulating in the media, alleging that the administration had taken on ₦80 trillion in fresh borrowing on top of the ₦75 trillion debt stock it inherited. In everyday terms, Nigerians were asking a version of the same question our letters asked: exactly how much do we owe, and where has that money gone?
Lawmakers used the session to seek clarity on:
Whatever one makes of the Minister's answers, the fact that a sitting Finance Minister was made to sit before the Senate and account, line by line, for the nation's debt position is exactly the kind of scrutiny citizens deserve as a matter of course, not as a rare event. It is the same principle behind our letters and the new House committee: the government cannot ask Nigerians to trust the figures if it will not show its working.
If you've ever asked "where did the money go?" about a government project in your community, this is what accountability looks like when it works: someone checks the law, writes the letter, names the exact section that was broken, explains it to the public in language they understand, and refuses to let silence be the answer. And an institution, under pressure, responds.
The committee's job now is to find out what happened to the money meant to work for you in 2024, 2025, and 2026. AdvoKC Foundation will be watching that process closely, and we'll keep telling you, in plain language, what it finds.
Because a budget you can't see is a promise you can't hold anyone to.
