Budget Transparency Survey 2022 Reports & More
over a decade, fiscal governance issues have taken the centre stage in
fiscal policy management. Good governance is predicated on four pillars:
transparency, predictability, participation, and accountability. The Nigerian States Budget Transparency Survey was created by
CIRDDOC to assess these pillars in Nigerian states’ budget process. The pillars are captured in the 2022 CIRDDOC’s Nigeria State
Budget Survey.
The survey brings to the fore issues of transparency, participation and accountability
in the budget and procurement process at the
sub-national level in Nigeria. As in previous
surveys, the 2022 survey, which is the fourth in
the series, employed a questionnaire approach similar to the International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Survey questionnaires. This multiple-choice questionnaire was completed by CIRDDOC’s civil society partners with backgrounds in fiscal governance in all 36 Nigerian states. The responses to these multiple-choice questions were then aggregated and computed to create the State Budget Transparency Index, which can be disaggregated into three sub-indices:
- State Budget Document Availability Index, which measures the number of publicly
available budget documents and their contents. - State Public Participation Index, which measures the extent to which the state executive, State House of Assemblies (SHoAs), and Auditor General (AG) involve
citizens throughout the budget process, and - State Procurement Process Index, which measures how robust state procurement
processes are and how much information is provided throughout the process.
It is interesting to note that this round of the SNBTS is coming on the heels of the
general elections in Nigeria.
Download State Budget Transparency Survey 2022 Report
VIEW RESULTS BY STATES
Budget Transparency Index 2022 Rankings
In terms of state-by-state performance, no state of the federation provided extensive budget information to the public (81%-100%) in 2022. This represents a significant decline from the 2020 performance in which two states, Ondo and Jigawa, provided extensive
budget information to the public, scoring 86% and 91% respectively. Eight states (Jigawa, Edo, Adamawa, Kano, Ondo, Akwa Ibom, Kogi and Yobe) can be said to be significantly transparent and provide an adequate amount of budget information to the public, as they score more than 60%. Conversely, 16 states (Ogun, Osun, Kaduna, Ekiti, Borno, Zamfara, Abia, Gombe, Katsina, Enugu,
Bauchi, Cross River, Oyo, Kwara, Kebbi and Anambra) are weakly transparent as they scored between 40 and 60. The remainder (Plateau, Bayelsa, Imo, Lagos, Ebonyi, Nasarawa, Taraba, Sokoto, Delta, Benue, Rivers and Niger) scored below 40. Overall, 14 states scored below the national average in 2022 compared to 20 states that scored below the national average in 2020 –
a modest improvement. compared to prior surveys, states have largely made more budget documents and information available. These improvements can be attributed to some of the reforms implemented at the state level, notably the SFTAS programme
Download 2022 Budget Transparency Index Score
Availability Of Key Budget Documents
In terms of individual state performance in 2022, only Jigawa provided extensive budget information to the public whilst seven other states (Edo, Adamawa, Kano, Ondo, Akwa Ibom, Kogi and Yobe) can be said to be significantly transparent and provide an adequate amount of budget information, as they score more than 60 (see Figure 10). However, 16 states (Ogun, Osun, Kaduna, Ekiti, Borno, Zamfara, Abia, Gombe, Katsina, Enugu, Bauchi, Cross River, Oyo, Kwara, Kebbi and
Anambra) are weakly transparent as they scored between 40 and 60. While Plateau, Bayelsa, Imo, Lagos, Ebonyi, Nasarawa, Taraba, Sokoto, Delta, Benue, Rivers and Niger scored below 40. In all, 14
states scored below the 2022 national average compared to 20 states that scored below the 2020 national average – a slight progress. The general decline in the average score reflects the decline in the scores of states. While some states improved their transparency score in 2022, the majority of states retrogressed (Table 3). Although Jigawa remains the most transparent state in terms of public availability of budget documents, its score fell from 91 in 2020 to 76 in 2022, and Ekiti scored 56 in 2022 compared to 71 in 2020. A few states improved their transparency: Edo, Abia, Yobe, and Osun improved their scores from 48, 50, 55 and 58 respectively in 2020 to 72, 53, 62 and 59 respectively in 2022 The details of the types of documents published by states showed that states’ publication of budget documents improved in 2022 compared to 2020.
Download 2022 Availability Of Key Budget Documents
Budget participation scores
Broadly speaking, data from the 2022 survey do not reveal significant efforts by individual states to involve the public in the budget process. Figure 12 presents the 2022 scores of the public participation index for the 36 states of Nigeria. By and large, there has not been significant improvement in the space created for public participation in the budget process in Nigerian states as there was only a very slight increase in the average performance of all the states in terms of the participation index, from 25.64% in 2020 to 28.42% in 2022 (less than 3%
improvement). Akin to the 2020 survey, Jigawa state topped the participation index with a performance of 98%, followed by Ogun and Kaduna with scores of 52% and 46% respectively. The 3 worstperforming states in terms of providing space for public participation in the budget process are Ebonyi, Rivers and Bauchi. Unlike in 2020 when two states (Adamawa and Zamfara) scored zero, no state scored zero in 2022, another modest sign of improvement in the space created for public participation in the budget process. A crucial sign of modest but incremental
improvement is that 26 states scored between 20 and 60 compared to the 10 and 16 states that fell into this bracket in the 2018 and 2020 surveys respectively. Despite these slight improvements, it is a very worrying sign that only Jigawa and Ogun made significant to extensive inroads in terms
of civic participation in the budget process. No other state could record even a 50% score in the participation index.