AdvoKC Foundation, a youth-led civic-tech organization committed to promoting transparency, democratic governance and public participation in Nigeria, has called on President, Bola Tinubu, to assent, without further delay, to the Federal Audit Service Bill, which has now passed both chambers of the 10th National Assembly and awaiting presidential action for over seven months.
The Bill aims to repeal the colonial Audit Ordinance of 1956, an instrument that, technically, ceased to be part of Nigerian law by virtue of the Revised Edition (Laws of the Federation of Nigeria) Decree of 1990 and is not found in either the 1990 or 2004 Laws of the Federation. Rather, the Bill would create a separate Federal Audit Service and Federal Audit Board, expand the powers of the Auditor-General for the Federation and, for the first time, introduce real timelines and sanctions to a function that has hitherto relied on slow, largely administrative penalties.
“The Auditor-General can tell Nigerians where public money has gone missing, but has no dependable way of making anyone answer for it,” said Habib Sheidu, Project Director of AdvoKC Foundation. That’s the difference between a watchman and a cop. This Bill finally gives teeth to the office. Every month it goes unsigned, it is a month that gap stays open.”
The call is coming on the heels of the International Monetary Fund’s 2026 Article IV Consultation report on Nigeria which revealed that capital spending equivalent to about two percent of the GDP, around N8.8 trillion, was executed outside the formal budget in 2025 and did not show up in official budget documents or implementation reports. In concluding that consultation, IMF executive directors emphasized concern about off-budget spending and complicated financing instruments and urged accelerating reforms to strengthen the budget process, public financial management, fiscal reporting, and accountability. The Fund’s staff report adds that the timely passage of the budget and the phasing out of the practice of overlapping budgets would further strengthen budget implementation, along with a call to resume the regular publication of audited government accounts.
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“The IMF report does not specify this Bill by name but it does not have to,” said Sheidu. “It spells out, virtually line for line, the very reform that this Bill would bring: a budget process that runs on time, accounts that are reconciled and published as a matter of routine, and an audit institution with the independence to enforce that discipline. You can’t separate the mess of overlapping and re-enacted budgets from the absence of the audit law that would have caught the slippage before it needed a repeal and re-enactment exercise to correct after the fact.”
The AdvoKC Foundation said that this is not the first time the reform has come this close.
The Bill was first proposed in the 6th National Assembly (2007-2011) and did not scale through. The 7th National Assembly’s version failed to get the two chambers to concur. The Bill was passed by the 8th National Assembly and transmitted for assent in January 2019, but it lapsed without assent and no reason was ever communicated to the National Assembly. The 9th National Assembly’s new attempt could not carry out the legislative process before the tenure of that Assembly expired in 2023.
The version now before President Tinubu, introduced afresh in the 10th Assembly in October 2023 and with passage by both chambers by December 2025, is therefore the fifth legislative attempt in almost two decades to give Nigeria a modern federal audit law, and only the second occasion on which it has reached a President’s desk.
The Foundation also cited Section 58(4) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) which provides that the President shall within 30 days of the receipt of such Bill, assent to the Bill or communicate his reasons for withholding assent. The Bill is long overdue now.
“Every week of silence is read as ambivalence about the reforms this administration claims to champion,” Sheidu added.
“This Bill costs nothing to sign and buys a lot: it tells the IMF, the World Bank and international investors that Nigeria’s fiscal reforms are anchored on institutions, not just on pronouncements. And it tells Nigerians that a report from the Auditor-General will mean something at last.”
AdvoKC Foundation calls on the President to give his assent to the Bill now and, with assent, to direct that the Federal Audit Board be constituted within 90 days, that a timeline be published for the appointment of the director general of the Federal Audit Service, and that a plain-language summary of the law be made public. The Foundation stated that it will be tracking these milestones on its PromiseTracker.ng platform.
