Monday was a good day to be a headline writer in Abuja. The Federal Executive Council sat, and by the time the ministers finished briefing State House correspondents, Nigeria had approved close to three trillion naira in fresh spending in a single sitting. Roads. Health. Ports. Youth service reform. A financing package running into billions of dollars. If you only read the press releases, you would think the country just discovered oil for the second time.
Let me lay out the numbers, because they are worth sitting with for a moment. The Ministry of Works got the nod for N2.078 trillion in road projects spanning 23 sites across Adamawa, Taraba, Ebonyi, Kwara, Cross River, Kogi, Lagos, Niger, Oyo and Plateau states. The health sector received N73.9 billion, including N62 billion for tuberculosis commodities and N6.9 billion for mobile blood donation clinics, as well as a new National Snakebite Treatment and Research Centre.
The Finance Ministry announced $2.96 billion, €200 million and N215 billion in financing arrangements for transport, agriculture, power and small businesses. Add N286 billion for maritime safety and port infrastructure, and a reform of the NYSC that the Minister of Youth Development, Ayodele Olawande, called the first major review since the scheme began in 1973. That is a lot of zeroes for one Monday.
Mind you, on paper, none of this is bad. A country with Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit needs roads, and a country that loses lives every year to preventable disease needs functioning hospitals and reliable supply chains for TB drugs and antivenom. Professor Muhammad Ali Pate’s disclosure that Nigeria records an estimated 43,000 snakebite cases annually, with the heaviest burden in the North East, North West and North Central, is the kind of statistic that should embarrass a country into action long before now. So the intentions on display are correct. My worry has never been about intentions. It is about what happens after the cameras leave the Council chambers.
Sadly, how much of what the FEC approved last year has actually been built, delivered or disbursed? Because Nigeria does not have a shortage of approvals. What we have a chronic shortage of is follow-through.
Take the Gashua road project in Yobe State as a small but telling example. Works Minister David Umahi disclosed that FEC had to approve an additional N15 billion to augment a contract originally awarded in 2022, blaming the increase on the rising cost of construction materials. Read between the lines and what you get is a familiar Nigerian story: a project costed once, abandoned or slowed for years, then re-costed at a premium once inflation and currency depreciation have done their damage. Multiply that pattern across the thousands of federal contracts sitting half-finished in every geopolitical zone, and you begin to understand why Nigeria can announce N2 trillion in roads today and still have citizens driving through craters on the same corridors five years from now.
The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is the poster child for this problem. Umahi disclosed that President Bola Tinubu has directed the Works Ministry to begin due process for reconstructing the deteriorating sections using concrete pavement technology, and that the FEC approved a Full Business Case for its operation and maintenance under a modified Swiss Challenge arrangement. I have lost count of how many administrations have promised to fix that road. Nigerians who commute that corridor daily have watched successive governments cut ribbons on sections of it since the last decade. The road remains one of the most dangerous and congested in the country. A new procurement model is welcome, but Nigerians have heard variations of this promise before, and forgive them if they reserve their applause until they see concrete, literally, on the ground.
On the NYSC reform, I will give credit where it is due. Retaining the one-year service duration while introducing skills-based training and a proposed Digital Corps stream is a sensible middle ground between scrapping the scheme entirely, as some have demanded for years, and leaving it frozen in a 1973 template that no longer serves a youth population drowning in unemployment.
Special Adviser Hadiza Bala Usman says the reforms will allow corps members in specialised streams to spend additional time earning professional certifications before deployment. Good.
There is also a quieter question buried inside the NYSC announcement that deserves more attention than it got. Redesigning the passing-out parade into a formal graduation ceremony and introducing professional identity certification sounds impressive in a briefing room, but what corps members actually complain about, year after year, has nothing to do with parades or certificates. It is insecurity in remote postings, allowances that arrive weeks late, and primary assignments that have nothing to do with a graduate’s field of study. Usman says the military will continue to provide security for corps members nationwide. Fine. But security promises for NYSC members have been made before, including after several corps members were killed during election duty in past cycles, and the promises did not stop the killings. A graduation ceremony will not fix that. Only serious investment in camp security and honest redeployment away from genuinely dangerous flashpoints will.
Then there is the N2.96 billion dollar-and-more financing package for transport, agriculture, power and small businesses, spread across CNG buses, Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones, a Niger State solar facility backed jointly by the Islamic Development Bank and the state government, and lending windows through the Development Bank of Nigeria. Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele deserves credit for grouping fourteen memoranda into five coherent strategic buckets rather than the usual scattergun approach. That is competent housekeeping. What Nigerians deserve now is a public account, published quarterly, of how much of that money has actually left the vault and reached a contractor, a farmer or a small business owner, and not just another press briefing a year from now announcing that the figures have been revised upward again.
Nigeria’s problem has never really been a shortage of policy or capital commitment on paper. Our problem is execution, monitoring and the courage to publish uncomfortable numbers when projects stall. Every administration since 1999 has held FEC meetings that produced impressive figures. Few have matched those figures with public dashboards that show completion rates, disbursement timelines, and contractor performance. Until that changes, these Monday briefings will keep reading like press releases from a country twice as rich as the one most Nigerians actually live in.
So what should change? First, every major FEC approval above a reasonable threshold, say N10 billion, should come with a public completion timeline and a named accounting officer, not just a minister who briefs correspondents and moves on to the next portfolio. Second, the National Assembly’s relevant committees should publish an annual scorecard tracking approved versus delivered projects, state by state, so that voters in Yobe, Niger or Ebonyi can hold their federal lawmakers accountable at the ballot box rather than relying on ministerial press briefings alone. Third, procurement reforms, such as the Swiss Challenge model applied to the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, should be replicated wherever private capital can share execution risk with government, because Nigeria’s balance sheet cannot carry every promise made in a Council chamber.
None of this is complicated. It does not require another committee, another retreat or another consultant’s report gathering dust on a shelf. It requires the political will to let citizens see what happens between approval and the ribbon-cutting, and the discipline to admit when a project has stalled, instead of quietly re-costing it three years later and hoping nobody remembers the original figure.
Nigerians have learned, through decades of hard experience, to treat FEC announcements the way a seasoned trader treats a hot stock tip: interesting, worth noting, but not worth betting the rent money on until the returns actually show up. Ministers Umahi, Pate, Oyedele, Keyamo, Olawande and Usman gave a good account of themselves at that briefing, and the ambition behind these approvals is not in question. The question is whether this administration will be remembered for the trillions it approved, or for the roads its citizens actually drove on.
