The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, Tuesday disclosed that the Federal Government recorded a significant revenue shortfall of N30 trillion in the 2025 fiscal year.
Edun made the disclosure while appearing before the House of Representatives Committees on Finance and National Planning during an interactive session on the 2026–2028 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper.
He said that the Federal Government projected N40.8tn revenue and it ended up making only N10.7tn.
This, however, is a sharp contrast to the declaration by President Bola Tinubu in September that the Federal Government had already met its revenue target.
The Federal Government had projected a revenue target of N40.8tn in 2025 to fund the N54.9tn “budget of restoration,” designed to stabilise the economy, secure peace and lay the foundation for long-term prosperity.
However, the minister said current fiscal performance shows that total revenue for the year is likely to end at about N10.7tn.
According to him, the sharp shortfall is largely attributable to weak oil and gas earnings, particularly Petroleum Profit Tax and Company Income Tax from oil and gas companies, alongside persistent underperformance across several revenue subheads.
“The current trajectory indicates that federal revenues for the full year will likely end at around N10.7tn compared to the N40.8tn projection,” Edun told lawmakers.
“Today I can stand here before you to brag: Nigeria is not borrowing.
We have met our revenue target for the year and we met it in August,” Tinubu had told members of The Buhari Organisation who visited him at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.
However, speaking on Tuesday, the finance minister admitted that revenue shortfall hampered the implementation of the N54.9tn 2025 budget.
He explained that although the Federal Government also raised about N14.1tn through borrowing, the combined inflows still fell far short of what was required to fully fund the 2025 budget.
Despite the revenue gap, Edun said the government had continued to meet critical obligations through what he described as prudent treasury management.
He noted that salaries, statutory transfers, as well as domestic and foreign debt service obligations, had been paid as and when due through “skillful, imaginative and creative handling” of available resources.
Providing further insight into expenditure performance, the minister said capital releases to ministries, departments and agencies in 2024 stood at N5.2tn out of a budgeted N7.1tn, representing 73 per cent performance.
He added that total capital expenditure, including multilateral and bilateral-funded projects, reached N11.1tn out of N13.7tn, or 84 per cent.
The minister cautioned that expenditure plans heavily tied to oil revenues must remain flexible, warning against committing the government to spending obligations based on projections that have consistently failed to materialise.
“We must be ambitious, but given the experience of the past two years, spending linked to these revenues must depend on the funds actually coming in,” he said.
Also speaking at the session, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Atiku Bagudu, said the MTEF and FSP were developed through extensive consultations with key stakeholders, including government agencies, the private sector, civil society organisations and development partners
Bagudu acknowledged that revenue assumptions remained a subject of intense debate within the Economic Management Team, explaining that while some members favoured conservative projections informed by historical performance, others argued for ambitious targets to compel revenue-generating agencies to improve efficiency and collection.
He disclosed that although the government retained an oil production target of 2.06 million barrels per day for policy planning, a more cautious assumption of 1.84 million barrels per day was adopted for revenue calculations in the 2026 budget framework.
Earlier, the Chairman of the House Committee on Finance, James Faleke, called for a more critical and realistic approach to budget preparation, warning against bloated budgets that often face serious implementation challenges.
Nigeria’s revenue performance in 2025 has been undermined by a combination of structural and cyclical factors.
