Oyo State's 2026 budget reports its 2024 spending as exactly equal to its 2024 budget, on 7,483 lines out of 7,489
Every Nigerian budget book carries a column for what was actually spent and collected in a past year. In Oyo State's approved 2026 budget, the column headed 2024 Full Year Actuals is a copy of the column headed 2024 Revised Budget, line for line and kobo for kobo, across 162 pages. It is a published claim that every agency hit its target exactly.
The table runs seven columns: 2024 Revised Budget, 2024 Full Year Actuals, 2025 Revised Budget, performance January to September, 2026 Approved Budget, and two tagging columns. The first two are meant to answer different questions. In this document they answer the same one.
On PDF page 147, the Oyo State Health Insurance Agency's revenue line reads 1,835,448,500.00 budgeted and 1,835,448,500.00 actual. Lautech Teaching Hospital, Ogbomoso: 740,386,857.30 and 740,386,857.30. The Oyo State College of Nursing Sciences: 388,131,804.43 and 388,131,804.43. The College of Health Science and Technology at Eleyele: 243,730,780.00 and 243,730,780.00.
This is not confined to one page or one sector. We tested every parseable data row in the document by column position: across 162 pages and 7,489 rows, the two columns are identical on 7,483. The six exceptions are four parsing artefacts, where digits inside a project description confuse the column detection, and two grand-total pages laid out differently. On the detail rows the match holds down to the smallest entries in the book, including a newspapers line at 92,624.00 and 92,624.00, and a line for dog licences.
Read literally, the document states that in 2024 every ministry, department and agency in Oyo State collected exactly the revenue it budgeted and spent exactly the money it was allocated, to the kobo, on every single line. No government has ever done that.
The state's own accounts say otherwise for the years on either side. The Accountant-General's fourth-quarter 2025 performance report puts total revenue performance at 72.3 per cent and total expenditure at 68.0 per cent. Those are ordinary numbers for a Nigerian state. The 2024 column in the budget book is not.
We cannot say what Oyo's real 2024 outturn was, because this document does not contain it. Nor can we say whether the duplication is deliberate or a spreadsheet failure in producing the book, and the second is considerably more likely than the first.
What it establishes is that the 2024 actuals column of Oyo's published 2026 budget carries no outturn information at all. Anyone consulting it to see how the state performed in 2024, including a legislator voting on the 2026 budget, is reading the 2024 budget back to themselves.
What this rests on
The document was opened and read by Vero. The identity of the two columns was established by position-based extraction across the whole book and confirmed by reading rendered pages, because this budget's columns do not survive naive text extraction.
What this does not establish
It does not establish what Oyo actually collected or spent in 2024. It does not establish that the duplication is deliberate rather than an error in producing the book. It does not establish that any money is missing. The six non-matching rows are parsing artefacts and layout differences, not exceptions to the pattern.
What we did ourselves
We tested the whole document rather than a sample, which is what turns an observation about one page into a finding about the book.
Sources for this report
(A) Oyo State 2026 Approved Budget, 214 pages, published by the Oyo State Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning. Column test run across all parseable detail rows by word x-position: 7,483 of 7,489 rows identical between the 2024 Revised Budget and 2024 Full Year Actuals columns; sample rows read visually on PDF pages 147 (revenue) and 90 (expenditure). Comparison figures from the Oyo State Budget Performance Report for 2025, Fourth Quarter, printed p.8.
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
None on this report. If you find an error, it will be published here, at the same length, with the date it was found, and the original wording will remain visible above it.