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

RMAFC image

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.