Waziri Adio: RMAFC’s approved 2025 budget is 32 times larger than its 2024 allocation

Waziri Adio, the founder of Agora Policy, a think tank, says the approved budget of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) for 2025 is 32 times larger than the agency’s 2024 allocation.

In his column for ThisDay on Sunday, Adio said the commission’s budget jumped from N3.27 billion in 2024 to N105.14 billion in 2025 — a whopping 3,000 percent increase.

The former government official questioned why RMAFC’s 2025 budget rose from an initial N5.6 billion to N105.14 billion after it was revised.

“In what planet would the revised budget of a public institution be about 20 times of its initial budget for the same year? The original budget of RMFAC for 2025 was as follows: N3.6 billion for personnel, N1.1 billion for overhead, and N916 million for capital,” the policy expert wrote.

“The RMAFC management didn’t shudder to think about the incongruity of the personnel budget rising by 472% (from N3.6 billion to N20.6 billion), the projection for overhead going up by 709% (from N1.1 billion to N8.9 billion) and the capital budget leaping by 7,705% (from N916 million to N71.5 billion) for the same year.

“But more troubling is that the legislators, who in theory are there to provide necessary checks, went along with the cruise. This goes to illustrate the point that trusting supervisory and oversighting institutions to provide the desired restraint on the super agencies is an unrealistic expectation.”

For context, the total approved budget for RMAFC in the five years (between 2020 and 2024) was N13.37 billion, he said.

A breakdown shows that N2.35 billion was allocated in 2020, N2.22 billion in 2021, N2.82 billion in 2022, N2.71 billion in 2023, and N3.27 billion in 2024.

Adio said the 2025 allocation alone was eight times the total budgets of the previous five years combined.

“If a credible case had been made that RMAFC was underfunded in the past and that this affected its effectiveness, the sensible thing would have been to establish the extent of its reasonable funding gap and see how to bridge it while ensuring greater predictability,” said the Agora Policy executive director.

“This approach probably would have led to a maximum of a five-fold jump in budgetary allocation for the commission, and even with that there would have been legitimate concerns about operational and absorptive capacity.

“But they went for the easy option of a revenue earmark, the dream of most government agencies, and RMAFC joyfully ended up with a 2025 budget that is 32 times its approved budget for the preceding year, 2024. What an amazing grace!”

THE DEVELOPMENTS THAT TRANSFORMED RMAFC’S FINANCES

Adio said while RMAFC should have adequate and predictable resources to perform its functions, the commission’s finances have been transformed by three recent developments.

This first one, according to the former executive secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), is the National Economic Council’s (NEC) approval that RMAFC should be allocated a fraction of non-oil revenue of the federation every month to fund its operations.

“According to Professor Charles Soludo, the governor of Anambra State, who briefed the press on 12th December 2024 about NEC’s decision on this issue, the council noted the onerous responsibilities placed on the commission and its need for alternative and improved funding,” he further wrote.

Adio referenced a “syndicated article” by a commissioner of RMAFC, stating that a new law for the agency was signed on April 2, 2025.

The Agora Policy founder explained that it was based on the law that the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) started transferring 0.5 percent of the non-oil component of statutory revenue to RMAFC from April 2025.

“By the way, I have taken the time to watch the briefing by Governor Soludo after the NEC meeting of December 2024 and I have read reports of the coverage of that briefing,” he said.

“The figure that Soludo kept mentioning was 0.05% of non-oil revenue, which is not exactly the same as 0.5%. Maybe one zero got mixed up somewhere.

“But it seems the memo that FAAC got was 0.5% of non-oil revenue and that is what it has been applying.

“It is important to state here that even 0.05% of non-oil revenue would still have been a major improvement on RMAFC’s prior funding, and may be about right.”

According to the policy expert, the third development came on July 22, 2025, when both chambers of the national assembly approved N105.14 billion as RMAFC’s 2025 budget.

“The entire sum was projected to come from what the commission would get as statutory transfer from 0.5% of Federation’s non-oil revenue, broken down as follows: N37.20 billion from January to June 2025 and N67.94 billion from July to December 2025,” he said.

“Not surprisingly, RMAFC intends to spend the entire sum, allocated as follows: N20.6 billion for personnel; N8.9 billion for overhead; and N71.5 billion for capital.”

Adio said if there was any hope that RMAFC might be an exception to “the feverish urge to splurge” by suddenly over-resourced agencies, that hope was dashed by the commission’s revised 2025 budget, which lawmakers approved despite passing its much lower previous budgets.