When Nigerians pay more for petrol, they know whom to blame. When a governor commissions a project funded partly by increased federal allocations, they know whom to praise.
What is often missing is the connection between those two events.
This reveals a weakness in our system of public accountability: the political cost of generating additional resources can fall heavily on the Federal Government, while credit for spending those resources is distributed across different levels of government.
Subsidy removal reduced an expenditure burden on federation resources. Exchange-rate changes and stronger revenue collections also contributed to larger naira revenues. These resources do not belong to the Federal Government alone. They support allocations to states and local governments too.
The Federation Account is a shared public purse.
Yet public debate often treats the President as responsible for the hardship associated with reform, while treating additional state spending as an achievement independent of the policies that helped finance it.
Governors deserve recognition for using public money well. But citizens should distinguish between receiving more money and managing it more effectively.
A bigger allocation is not, by itself, proof of better leadership.
The appropriate questions are: How much additional money did the state receive? What did it deliver? Were projects reasonably priced? Did services improve? How much came from the state’s own productive economy, and how much arrived through federation transfers?
This matters especially in the debate over restoring fuel subsidy.
If a broad subsidy is financed by reducing the oil revenue available for distribution, the same shared purse becomes smaller. Unless additional revenues offset the cost, states and local governments would have less available for salaries, pensions, roads, schools, healthcare and other responsibilities.
Citizens could gain at the petrol station while losing through weaker public services.
The size of that trade-off would depend on the subsidy’s coverage, oil prices, export volumes and funding arrangements. Increasing crude exports could help, but it would not automatically make an open-ended subsidy affordable.
Governors should therefore participate honestly in the debate. A governor advocating subsidy restoration should explain what it would mean for the state’s allocation and which spending commitments would change.
Alternatively, a state could propose defined relief from its own approved budget. That would make the choice clearer: how much support, for whom, for how long, and at the expense of what?
This argument does not absolve the Federal Government. It remains accountable for policy design, implementation, hardship mitigation and its own spending.
It extends accountability to everyone who receives and spends public resources.
Nigerians should follow their money through the entire journey—from the policies that generate it to the institutions that spend it.
When the public bears the sacrifice, every benefiting level of government owes the public an explanation of the results.
Further reading
World Bank: Nigeria Development Update, 8 October 2026
Read the detailed fuel-subsidy analysis
Beyond FAAC: Governors Must Demonstrate How They Create Public Value