A pro-Tinubu group, the Renewed Hope Labourers Network, has faulted the United States government’s fiscal transparency report on Nigeria, arguing that it gave too little credit to reforms already carried out by Nigerian institutions.
In a statement issued on Friday, RHOLAN’s Director General, John Ali Ude, said the conclusion reached in the fiscal transparency report does not reflect the disclosures and institutional measures introduced to strengthen public financial management in the country. He argued that the assessment leaned more on perception than on figures that can be checked independently.
The US Department of State released the 2026 fiscal transparency report on Tuesday. It found that Nigeria had failed to meet the minimum requirements for the second consecutive year, with no significant progress recorded in improving financial management during 2025. The department assessed 139 governments and the Palestinian Authority. Only 73 met the minimum standards. Of the 67 that fell short, 14 showed significant progress, while 53, Nigeria among them, were judged to have made none.
RHOLAN pointed to specific digital systems it said the report underplayed, including the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System, and the Open Treasury Portal.
It called Nigeria’s publication of its enacted budget and debt data online a measurable development that can be independently verified. RHOLAN also cited the country’s commitments under the Open Government Partnership as further evidence of progress that the fiscal transparency report did not fully capture.
That framing runs into difficulty once set against Nigeria’s own budget record this year. The 2026 Appropriation Act, worth N68.32 trillion, was not signed into law until April 17, more than three months into the fiscal year it was meant to govern.
Lawmakers then extended implementation of the 2025 capital budget to June 30, 2026. That meant three budget cycles were effectively running at once. Prof Franklin Ngwu of the Lagos Business School Public Sector Initiative put the confusion bluntly. He asked which year’s budget Nigeria was even operating on and noted that nobody seemed certain.
The same 2026 budget contained a N1.3 billion allocation to an agency the Presidency later admitted does not exist. Analysts have also flagged more than 11,000 constituency projects worth over N6.9 trillion that were inserted into the previous year’s appropriation. They argue there was little transparent planning behind many of those projects.
Atiku Abubakar’s campaign separately raised concerns over N12.8 trillion concentrated under a single Service-Wide Vote line, spread across just ten ministries, departments and agencies. It described the money as effectively unaccounted for in the public budget documents.
None of this contradicts RHOLAN’s narrower point that platforms like IPPIS and the Open Treasury Portal exist and publish data. The fiscal transparency report itself acknowledged as much. But the existence of a disclosure system is not the same as the accountability it is meant to produce. That is where the gap between RHOLAN’s argument and the daily experience of many Nigerians becomes most visible.
A budget portal that logs numbers does little for a citizen watching debt servicing consume close to N16 trillion of a roughly N54 trillion federal budget. It offers even less comfort to households grappling with a weaker naira that has made imported food and fuel steadily more expensive, regardless of what any online dashboard shows.
Not everyone reading the fiscal transparency report has reached RHOLAN’s conclusion. Paul Ibe, media aide to Atiku Abubakar, said the findings validate concerns his principal has raised for years about disclosure of public revenue and spending under President Bola Tinubu. He argued that Nigerians deserve clarity on where public resources come from and how they are spent.
The 2026 assessment also introduced a tougher requirement this year, compelling governments to disclose the terms and conditions of sovereign loans, including liabilities and collateralised assets. Nigeria made information on debt obligations publicly available, but the department stopped short of determining whether its loan terms met the new standard, a gap RHOLAN’s statement did not directly address.
The State Department has been careful to frame the exercise narrowly, saying failing the fiscal transparency report assessment does not amount to a corruption ranking, just as meeting it does not guarantee the absence of one.
But it does not rescue RHOLAN’s central claim. The argument that Nigeria’s digital reforms deserve more credit sits awkwardly beside a budget signed months late, a phantom agency, and trillions of naira in spending that even lawmakers and economists struggle to trace.
For most Nigerians, the fiscal transparency report reads less like an unfair external judgement and more like a formal echo of what they already live with. Whether one agrees with Washington’s assessment or not, the fiscal transparency report has reignited scrutiny of how public money is managed and disclosed in Nigeria.
