STATE POWER, PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY AND THE IMPERATIVE OF CITIZENS SYNERGY

By George Sabo Koce

State power is a trust, not a trophy. Yet today that trust is being auctioned in plain sight.

The figures are no longer allegations. They are line items in our national shame. Hospitals lack syringes and schools have no roofs, and still the 2025 and 2026 budgets reveal a bizarre obsession with prestige over people.

According to BudgIT’s review of the 2025 federal budget, the National Assembly inserted 11,122 projects worth N6.93 trillion, over 12% of the entire N54.99 trillion appropriation.

More troubling still, 238 of those projects, representing N2.29 trillion, were inserted with little to no justification. The rot is not confined to the legislature. An Auditor-General’s report on 2024 operations flagged financial irregularities, weak internal controls and other lapses across federal ministries, departments and agencies estimated at over N1.34 trillion, including N76.96 billion in irregular contracts alone.

THIS IS WHERE WHITE ELEPHANTS BREED

Vehicles and lodges over lives. According to a recent review, at least twelve states earmarked about N102 billion in their 2025 budgets for official-lodge upgrades, office renovations and vehicle procurement, with Lagos alone accounting for roughly N33 billion.

The absurdity deepens in Akwa Ibom, a state that recorded N1.134 trillion in revenue in 2025. The government still budgeted N1 billion for ten SUVs for former deputy governors—money that could have built thousands of classroom seats instead.

Palaces over primary healthcare. Tracka’s analysis of the 2026 budget uncovered an even stranger allocation: N22.15 billion earmarked for constructing, renovating and furnishing 106 palace buildings, with eleven of those projects, worth N5.85 billion, carrying no identified location at all.

The projects were spread across 45 federal agencies, yet none of these agencies has the statutory mandate to build palaces. Among the unlikely palace contractors listed were the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency and the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Dawanau.

Frivolities over fundamentals. This is a budgeting culture where money multiplies fastest wherever oversight is weakest, and where an oil-spill agency can find itself listed as a palace contractor and nobody blinks.

President Tinubu himself has twice had to say the quiet part aloud. In July 2026, he urged governors across Nigeria to stop spending public funds on unnecessary flyovers in areas with little traffic, telling them to channel swollen federal allocations into infrastructure that actually serves citizens.

Weeks later, addressing the country’s new Regional Development Commissions, he was blunter still: “The era of white elephant projects is over, and there is no excuse for the Commissions to become another conduit for wasting public funds.” Coming from the presidency itself, it is less a reform pledge than a confession.

Meanwhile, a sobering reality emerged from Ben Akabueze, former Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, at a National Assembly policy dialogue: more than 56,000 government projects remain uncompleted across the country. Yet we keep budgeting for new palaces, new SUVs, new lodges. This is not budgeting. It is betrayal.

Security, economy, health and infrastructure were supposed to anchor the priorities behind the 2026 budget call circular. Instead, copy-paste line items, phantom projects and luxury procurement crowded them out.

Public accountability, then, is not a slogan. It is survival. And it will never come from those feeding fat on this rot. It comes only when citizens stop clapping for flyovers where there is no traffic, and start demanding drugs in our hospitals, roofs over our classrooms, and security in our villages.

Organized corruption can only be defeated by organized citizenship. That synergy is now imperative.

BY- GEORGE SABO KOCE

25th October, 2026.