Despite ₦3.3tn Budget, Lagos Ranked Nigeria’s Worst State in Fiscal Transparency Again in 2025

Lagos State, despite having Nigeria’s biggest budget and revenue base, has been ranked last on the fiscal transparency index for the second consecutive quarter in 2025.

The assessment was contained in the State Fiscal Transparency Report published on Tuesday by BudgIT, a civic organisation tracking public finance accountability.

According to the report, Lagos recorded poor marks across most categories, including zero in its Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, 15 in the approved budget, zero in the citizens’ budget, 16 in quarterly budget reports, 14 in the accountant-general’s report, five in e-procurement, and eight in its fiscal data repository.

“Lagos State ranked 36th in the 2025 second quarter of the State Fiscal Transparency League. This position reflects gaps in some critical areas of disclosure and accessibility of fiscal documents, which significantly lowered the state’s overall performance despite notable strengths in other areas,” BudgIT said.

The group explained that the approved budget lacked key classifications such as total revenue by administrative heads, expenditure by functions, and capital projects by programme, thereby limiting what citizens and stakeholders could access.

Although Lagos was praised for publishing quarterly budget implementation reports and maintaining what BudgIT described as a “strong Accountant-General’s Report”, its e-procurement portal and fiscal data repository were labelled either non-functional or inaccessible.

“The state website’s fiscal data repository also needs improvement, as while the structure is available, the content is not accessible to users. Issues were also observed with the e-procurement portal, which requires updates to include awarded contracts,” the report noted.

Lagos’ failure to publish an MTEF and a citizens’ budget was identified as the most damaging factor to its ranking.

This is not the first time concerns have been raised over Lagos’s opacity. In September, the Foundation for Investigative Journalism reported that the state blocked journalists, citizens and civil society groups from monitoring public contracts by failing to maintain its procurement portal.

The latest findings also highlight how Lagos and other states abandoned reforms introduced under the World Bank-backed States Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability (SFTAS) programme despite receiving millions of dollars in funding.

The criticism comes at a time when Lagos has been spending far more than any other state in Nigeria. In 2024, the state approved a budget of ₦2.27 trillion, which rose to ₦3.366 trillion in 2025, more than double Niger State’s ₦1.56 trillion budget, which ranked as the second highest.

Despite controlling the country’s largest subnational budget, Lagos continues to fall behind on the most basic measures of openness, leaving citizens and watchdog groups with little access to how trillions are being spent.