Governor Seyi Makinde has just dropped the biggest political stunt of his career on Oyo State: A proposed ₦1.115 trillion 2027 budget, cynically branded the “Budget of Sustained Progress.” In reality, it is the Budget of Sustained Looting and Political Packaging. This is not governance. It is the final act of a man who has spent eight years turning Oyo’s resources into a personal campaign war chest while the people still beg for functional roads, working schools, and hospitals that do more than dispense paracetamol.
He allocates ₦670.03 billion to so-called capital projects and ₦445.31 billion to recurrent spending. On paper it looks developmental. In practice, it is the classic PDP turned APM playbook: Announce trillion-naira figures months before you leave office, award contracts to cronies, mount billboards, cut ribbons, and dump the unfinished mess, abandoned sites, and ballooning debt on the next administration. How many of these “capital projects” will actually be completed before May 2027? How many will become white-elephant monuments to Makinde’s ego, with the next governor forced to either complete them at double the cost or abandon them while Oyo taxpayers continue servicing the loans?
The budget is only about 1.2 percent above Oyo’s revised 2026 figure of ₦1.102 trillion. But that modest increase hides the real pattern of recklessness. The 2026 budget started at ₦891.99 billion before a ₦210 billion supplementary appropriation was hurriedly pushed through, catapulting it past one trillion. When Makinde’s ambition outgrows the numbers, the answer is never fiscal discipline. It is always more budgeting, more supplementary appropriations, more borrowing, and more glossy announcements. This is not prudent management. This is a governor who treats the state treasury like an ATM for political projects.
Makinde keeps talking about “prudent financial management” while Oyo continues to borrow even as FAAC allocations rise and internally generated revenue has reportedly climbed from ₦26.95 billion in 2019 to ₦103.25 billion in 2026. Where is the money going? Why does a state with significantly improved revenue still need to load more debt onto future generations? The people of Oyo are entitled to a full, itemized public account of total debt stock, interest payments, repayment schedules, and exactly which of Makinde’s “signature projects” are being financed by these loans. Until that happens, every claim of prudence is empty propaganda.
The real test is not the size of the budget speech or the quality of the PowerPoint. It is whether the roads stop looking like temporary campaign posters that wash away with the next rain. It is whether schools finally have enough teachers, desks, and roofs that do not leak. It is whether hospitals have drugs, equipment, and personnel beyond the photo-op level. Under Makinde, governance has too often been reduced to ribbon-cutting ceremonies and billboard governance: Projects announced with fanfare, photographed for social media, and then left to decay once the cameras leave. Citizens see the gap between the trillion-naira headlines and the daily reality on the ground.
Makinde’s real project is not Oyo State. It is Seyi Makinde the national figure. Ambition itself is not a crime, but using the final budget of your governorship as a trillion-naira farewell party and a platform to position yourself for higher office while leaving the state with unfinished projects and questions over debt is the height of political selfishness. Leadership is not measured by how large a budget you can present. It is measured by fiscal restraint, transparent procurement free of cronyism, projects that are actually completed, and a debt burden that does not become the next governor’s permanent headache.
Oyo people should demand immediate answers: Exactly how much the state receives from FAAC, what it truly generates internally, the full picture of its debts and contingent liabilities, which specific projects will be finished before May 2027, and what concrete mechanisms exist to prevent the rest from being abandoned once Makinde leaves? Until those answers come with evidence, not slogans, the “Budget of Sustained Progress” stands exposed for what it is — a massive, last-minute spending spree designed to burnish one man’s image at the expense of the state he claims to serve.
This is not sustained progress. It is sustained exploitation of Oyo’s resources for political packaging. The people of Oyo deserve better than a governor who spends his final months writing the largest budget in the state’s history while the real work of governance remains unfinished.