Enugu 2026 Budget: A Bubble Built on Fictional Revenues

Chief Ude Livinus

Governor Peter Mbah’s signing of a ₦1.62 trillion 2026 budget, anchored on a projected ₦870 billion Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), raises serious questions of credibility, fiscal honesty, and governance realism.

This is a state that is currently owing over ₦36 billion in pensions and gratuities and about ₦40 billion to contractors. Yet, the same government now claims that revenue operatives at Lion Building “generated” ₦400 billion by the end of 2025 and can magically scale that figure to ₦870 billion in 2026.

To put this claim in perspective, the Governor further asserted that Enugu State is now generating ₦2.5 billion daily.

This is not economic transformation; it is statistical fantasy.

Enugu residents have effectively become the latest minting press, expected to conjure revenues that do not exist in the real economy. There is no corresponding industrial base, no manufacturing boom, no export surge, no disclosed tax-base expansion to justify such exponential growth. Revenue does not rise by declarations; it rises by production, productivity, and trust—all of which are glaringly absent from the government’s explanations.

What is being presented is another sham budget, built on fictitious and non-existent revenues, destined to collapse under its own weight.

The expenditure side deepens the concern:

₦30 billion for school feeding in “smart schools”

A ₦135.5 billion rail project

14 additional aircraft

Enugu New City

260 smart schools

260 hospitals

10,000km of roads, now rebranded as “1,002 roads under construction”

These are not budgetary priorities grounded in fiscal reality. They read like campaign promises of a governorship aspirant, not a serious appropriation law of a sitting government already drowning in unpaid obligations.

Budgets are instruments of discipline, not propaganda brochures. When revenues are inflated and liabilities ignored, the result is predictable: borrowed spending, unpaid workers, abandoned projects, and future insolvency.

Enugu State is not on a development highway; it is currently riding in a “one-chance bus” of fiscal deception, where figures look impressive on paper but translate into hardship, unpaid pensions, and broken trust on the ground

BREAK DOWN OF FACTS

₦1.62trn budget. ₦870bn IGR. ₦2.5bn daily revenue—

Yet ₦36bn owed pensioners, ₦40bn owed contractors.

No industrial boom. No export surge. No tax base expansion.

This is not reform.

It’s a budget built on fiction.

Enugu is riding a one-chance bus of fiscal deception.