Agriculture's capital budget grew by N2.13 trillion between the Bill and the Act while its personnel and overhead did not move by one naira
In the Budget Office's published Bill details, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security has a capital allocation of N1,300,452,463,830. In the signed Act it has N3,427,147,237,462. Personnel and overhead are identical in both, to the last digit. The ministry also acquires 3,423 project lines that the Bill does not contain.
Row 21 of the Bill details' summary table, printed page 2, reads: 0215, FEDERAL MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SECURITY, personnel 136,264,346,724, overhead 11,256,793,867, capital 1,300,452,463,830, total allocation 1,447,973,604,421.
The same ministry in the signed Act, printed page 483, reads: personnel 136,264,346,724, overhead 11,256,793,867, capital 3,427,147,237,462, total 3,574,668,378,053.
Put the two rows together and the pattern is unusually clean. Personnel is byte-identical. Overhead is byte-identical. Capital rises by N2,126,694,773,632, an increase of 163.5 per cent, and carries the ministry's total up by 146.9 per cent. Nothing about the ministry's establishment changed; only what it is to build.
That shape matters because it narrows the explanation. A ministry whose staffing and running costs are untouched has not been reorganised, absorbed another agency or had its mandate widened. The entire movement is in the capital column.
Most of it can be located. Of the 8,076 project lines in the Act that carry a code prefix the Bill never uses, 3,423 sit under Agriculture's headquarters code, and they are worth N1,983,244,093,632 between them. That is 93 per cent of the capital increase, line by line, in the Act's own tables.
The remaining 7 per cent, a little over N143bn, is not accounted for by that block and we could not trace it within the two documents.
None of this establishes that the money is misdirected, or that agriculture does not need it. Nigeria's food security spending has been rising for several budget cycles and a large capital increase is a defensible policy choice. What the documents establish is narrower and checkable: between the version the Budget Office published and the version the President signed, one ministry's construction budget more than doubled while the cost of running it stayed the same to the naira, and most of the increase arrives as projects with codes that did not previously exist.
What this rests on
Both figures read off the printed summary rows in the two documents, which Vero opened and read. The attribution of N1.98tn of the increase to 3,423 new project lines comes from extracting the project-code column of the Act and matching against the Bill.
What this does not establish
It does not establish who authorised the increase or when. It does not establish that the spending is wrong, unnecessary or improperly directed. It does not account for roughly N143bn of the rise. It does not establish that the new project codes represent new projects rather than existing projects recoded.
What we did ourselves
We set the two published summary rows for the same ministry side by side, which shows that the increase is entirely in capital, and then located 93 per cent of it in named project lines inside the Act.
Sources for this report
(A) 2026 Appropriation Bill (Details), Budget Office of the Federation, SUMMARY BY MDAs, printed p.2, row 21: capital 1,300,452,463,830, total 1,447,973,604,421. 2026 Appropriation Act as assented, printed p.483: capital 3,427,147,237,462, total 3,574,668,378,053, with personnel 136,264,346,724 and overhead 11,256,793,867 identical in both.
Confidence: high. This is our own assessment of whether the event occurred as described, separate from the grade, which describes what kind of thing the claim rests on.
Not obtained: where the underlying document is named above but not linked, we did not hold a copy at the time of publication. We purchase nothing and request nothing in our own name.
Corrections
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