It is budget presentation season in Nigeria yet the Open Treasury Portal (OTP), a platform designed for Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to report daily transactions and enable public financial monitoring, has been down for days.
FIJ observed the portal’s inaccessibility on Monday and the issue remained unresolved at press time. Since then, FIJ has called the department through the phone line available on the webpage to no avail. No one answered the calls.
In December 2019, former president Muhammadu Buhari launched the Open Treasury Portal as part of his administration’s commitment to transparency. The portal was intended to ensure the “timely availability of financial information” for civil society groups and citizens.
Buhari had said that all MDAs must publish daily reports of payments above N5 million. He also mandated that the Accountant General of the Federation (AGF) release daily treasury statements detailing inflows and outflows.
“The AGF and all accounting officers must publish daily payments reports,” Buhari said during the launch.
“With these reports, the treasury will publish payments of at least N10 million, and all MDAs must provide answers to any questions from the public regarding their transactions.”
With the portal’s current unavailability journalists, citizens, and observers who rely on it to track government spending, are at a loss, especially during a critical time for fiscal information sourcing.
The need for transparency is particularly pressing because Bola Ahmed Tinubu presented the budget for the 2025 fiscal year on Wednesday. During the presentation, the president had pegged the 2024 budget performance by Q3 at 85% for expenditure and 75% for revenue.
But Godswill Akpabio, the Senate President, had recently passed a bill to extend the running of the 2025 budget to June 30, 2025, because of performance reasons. Akpabio had said that capital expenditure performance for the 2024 fiscal year was at 50% and recurrent expenditure at 48%.
“We have noted the 2024 budget performances… Given these great achievements, we have deemed it necessary to extend the life of the 2024 budget,” Akpabio said.
A 50% performance for capital expenditure means only half of the planned projects for 2024 had been funded, while a 48% recurrent expenditure performance indicates that less than half of the allocated funds for salaries, overheads and debt servicing had been used.
Meanwhile, FIJ found that Nigeria had spent only 38% of its allocated funds for capital and recurrent expenditures across all MDAs as recently as September’s end, according to the Open Treasury Portal.
The portal’s inaccessibility contravenes the guidelines set by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). Section 7.3.1 of the guidelines mandates that all government websites remain operational at all times.
Source: FIJ