A DOCTRINAL AND IDEOLOGICAL READING OF THE ADAMAWA STATE 2026 BUDGET
Babayola M. Toungo
At its core, the 2026 budget is anchored in developmental statism - the belief that the state must act as the primary driver of structural transformation, especially in fragile or historically underdeveloped political economies such as Adamawa. This doctrine rejects minimalist governance and instead affirms an active, interventionist state that invests heavily in infrastructure, human capital, and institutional capacity.
The allocation of 64.1% to capital expenditure is doctrinally significant. It signals a deliberate attempt to escape the post-colonial Nigerian trap of consumption-heavy budgets by reasserting the classical development-state logic: growth precedes redistribution, but growth itself must be deliberately engineered by public power.
This is not laissez-faire economics. It is a state-led accumulation strategy, moderated by fiscal discipline and accounting transparency.
2. Ideological Orientation: Social Democratic Welfarism, Not Neoliberalism
Ideologically, the budget is best described as social-democratic welfarism with technocratic discipline.
Several features support this reading:
• Heavy investments in education (₦111.4bn), health (₦47.9bn), poverty alleviation, youth, and gender programmes reflect a normative commitment to social justice and equality of opportunity.
• The state explicitly prioritizes human capital development over market fundamentalism.
• There is no evidence of mass privatization, subsidy withdrawal, or fiscal austerity doctrines typical of neoliberal adjustment regimes.
Instead, the budget adopts a Keynesian-underdevelopment logic: public spending is treated not as a liability but as a productive instrument for demand stimulation, employment creation, and long-term capacity building.
3. The Political Economy of the Budget: Post-Consolidation Re-engineering
The language of “post-consolidation re-engineering” is revealing. It suggests that the administration under Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri sees its first term as having stabilized the system - restoring basic functionality - and now seeks to restructure the growth path of Adamawa State.
This is consistent with:
• Large allocations to roads, power, works, housing, and urban development
• A massive programme head for Reform of Government and Governance (₦185.9bn)—which doctrinally implies institutionalism: the belief that development failure is rooted not only in lack of money but in weak rules, systems, and coordination.
The state is thus not merely spending - it is attempting to rewire itself.
4. Fiscal Morality and Administrative Rationalism
The insistence on IPSAS compliance, e-budgeting, vote-of-charge discipline, and digital migration reflects a deeper ideological commitment to fiscal morality and bureaucratic rationalism.
This draws from Max Weber’s conception of the modern state:
legitimacy flows from rule-bound, predictable, and impersonal administration.
In Nigerian political context where opacity and discretion often dominate this is a quietly radical stance. It signals a shift from patrimonial budgeting to rules-based public finance, aligning Adamawa with global public-sector reform norms rather than extractive local political traditions.
5. Revenue Ideology: Pragmatic Federalism, Not Fiscal Illusion
Ideologically, the revenue framework is pragmatic rather than romantic:
• The state accepts continued dependence on federal transfers (FAAC, VAT, NLNG) while incrementally expanding IGR.
• There is no populist illusion of instant fiscal autonomy.
• Instead, the approach reflects incremental fiscal federalism extracting maximum value from the federation while strengthening internal capacity over time.
This is realism, not rhetoric.
6. Sectoral Allocations as Ideological Signals
Budgets are moral documents. What they fund reveals what they value.
• Education as the single largest social investment indicates belief in intergenerational mobility rather than elite entrenchment.
• Strong allocations to rural infrastructure, water, agriculture, and RAAMP suggest an anti-urban bias correction, acknowledging that development failure in Adamawa is spatial and rural.
• The modest allocation to “Growing the Private Sector” reflects a belief that markets follow infrastructure and institutions, not the other way around.
This reverses the neoliberal sequence.
7. What the Budget Is Not
Equally important is what this budget does not represent:
• It is not an ethnic budget—allocations are sectoral and programmatic, not sectional.
• It is not a rent-distribution budget—recurrent spending remains restrained.
• It is not austerity-driven social spending is protected and expanded.
8. The Ideological Risk: Implementation as the Final Battleground
The document correctly acknowledges that implementation is the real ideology.
Without disciplined execution, capital-heavy budgets risk becoming:
• Procurement pipelines rather than development engines
• Statistical progress without lived transformation
Thus, the administration’s ideological credibility now rests not on intent, but on delivery capacity, procurement integrity, and project completion rates.
Doctrinally, the 2026 Adamawa State Budget affirms developmental statism. Ideologically, it aligns with social-democratic welfarism tempered by technocratic governance. Politically, it signals a post-stabilization ambition to re-engineer growth rather than merely manage scarcity.
If implemented faithfully, it positions Adamawa not as a peripheral recipient of federal largesse, but as a subnational development state in formation a rare but consequential experiment in Nigeria’s federal political economy.
The budget, therefore, is not just an accounting document. It is a statement of belief about what government is for.
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