President Bola Tinubu has signed the Appropriation (Amendment) (No. 4) Bill, 2025, into law. This law extends the time for using the capital part of the 2025 budget from September 30 to December 31, 2026.
Bayo Onanuga, who speaks for the president, shared this news in a statement on Wednesday.
Mr Tinubu signed the bill just a day after both the Senate and the House of Representatives approved it.
“President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has signed into law the Appropriation (Amendment) (No.4) Bill, 2025, extending the implementation period of the 2025 budget from September 30, 2026 to December 31, 2026.
“The assent followed the amendment’s swift passage by both the Senate and the House of Representatives on Tuesday, September 29, 2026.
“This extension gives Ministries, Departments and Agencies more time to finish ongoing capital projects. It ensures that funds already set aside are fully used for Nigerians, without disrupting important programmes.
The President praised the leaders and members of the National Assembly for quickly considering the bill. This shows good teamwork between the Executive and the Legislature for the country,” Mr Onanuga said.
With the president’s approval, Nigeria has now extended the use of the capital part of the 2025 budget for a fourth time. This budget was supposed to end two years ago.
Originally, the implementation was meant to finish on December 31, 2025. But it was first pushed to March 31, 2026, to help the federal government complete projects included in the budget.
After March 31, lawmakers extended the deadline to June 30, 2026, for the same reasons. When June passed, they pushed it again to September 30.
The repeated extensions of budget capital components have raised worries since Bola Tinubu became president. Lawmakers and economic experts have often criticized this practice.
On October 9, 2025, the former Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, told the Senate Committee on Finance that the government would stop extending budget timelines beyond the fiscal year.
In December 2025, President Bola Tinubu also said he would end the trend of having overlapping budgets while presenting the 2026 budget to a joint session of the National Assembly.
Mr Tinubu assured Nigerians that by March 31, 2026, all capital debts would be fully paid off.
“We’re ending the practice of running three budgets at once. By March 31, 2026, all capital debts from previous years will be fully paid off. From April, Nigeria will follow a single budget,” the president promised.
But this latest extension means the capital part of the 2025 budget will stay open until the end of 2026. This shows that the government has not met the timeline it set.
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