BY LANRE OGUNDIE
THERE is an expensive habit in Nigerian governance that rarely appears as a separate item in the national accounts. It does not have a budgetary code. No ministry presents an appropriation request for it. Yet the country pays for it repeatedly.
It is the cost of starting again.
A new administration arrives. A new minister takes charge. A new committee is inaugurated. A new policy is announced. Sometimes the language changes more than the substance. Sometimes an existing programme is renamed. At other times, something already underway is abandoned because it belongs to the previous government.
Then the process begins again.
The Federal Government appears to recognise some part of this problem. In preparing the 2026 budget, ministries, departments and agencies were directed not to introduce new capital projects and to roll over 70 per cent of their 2025 capital budgets into 2026. The stated intention was to strengthen continuity and ensure that uncompleted projects were not abandoned.
This is not an argument for preserving every government policy simply because it already exists. Governments must change direction when circumstances demand it. A bad policy should be corrected. A failed programme should not be protected by sentiment. Public resources should not be wasted merely to preserve the pride of a predecessor.
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The difficulty is knowing where necessary correction ends and institutional amnesia begins.
Nigeria has had enough development plans to know the difference.
The Economic Recovery and Growth Plan ran from 2017 to 2020. The National Development Plan 2021 to 2025 succeeded it, with the government itself explaining that the new plan was intended to build on the achievements and lessons of the ERGP. A new development framework for 2026 to 2030 has now been introduced as the next stage of the country’s development strategy. The succession of plans is not in itself evidence of failure. Countries revise development strategies all the time. The question is what survives from one plan into the next.
That question becomes more troubling when the people responsible for implementing policy change faster than the institutions can absorb the lessons from what went before.
The power sector provides a revealing example. In 2024, the then Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, acknowledged that frequent changes in the leadership of the ministry had made policy continuity difficult. His explanation was remarkably candid: each new minister tended to bring a different policy direction, resulting in changes and the abandonment of previous policies.
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That admission deserves to be remembered.
Electricity infrastructure does not operate according to the tenure of a minister. A power plant does not become obsolete because a cabinet changes. A transmission line does not know which political party awarded its contract. An investor committing billions to an energy project needs to know that the policy environment will still make sense after the minister who signed the agreement has left office.
The same principle applies to a factory, a farm, a university, a road project or a public transport system.
Business does not invest in political tenure. It invests in predictability.
That is why policy continuity is not a bureaucratic luxury. It is part of the economic infrastructure of a country.
The Federal Government appears to recognise some part of this problem. In preparing the 2026 budget, ministries, departments and agencies were directed not to introduce new capital projects and to roll over 70 per cent of their 2025 capital budgets into 2026. The stated intention was to strengthen continuity and ensure that uncompleted projects were not abandoned.
There is wisdom in that decision.
Nigeria has spent too much money beginning projects and too little time ensuring that projects reach the point where citizens can actually use them.
The Federal Capital Territory offers a striking illustration. In July, FCT Minister Nyesom Wike said about 70 per cent of the projects completed by the administration under President Bola Tinubu were inherited contracts, some of them abandoned for 15 or 16 years.
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Consider what that means. A project conceived by one government can survive the government that conceived it, the government that inherited it and several changes of political leadership before somebody finally decides to finish it.
During those years, prices rise. Contracts become contentious. Contractors demobilise. Communities wait. Infrastructure deteriorates. The original purpose may remain, but the cost of achieving it changes.
The country pays for the delay.
And sometimes it pays again to recover what it had already paid for.
That is why abandoned projects should not be treated merely as monuments to governmental incompetence. They are evidence of a deeper failure of state memory.
A serious administration should inherit more than files.
It should inherit the reasoning behind decisions, the commitments already made, the agreements reached with investors and communities, the technical studies conducted, the mistakes made and the lessons learned. When that institutional memory disappears every time political authority changes hands, the next government spends precious time rediscovering what the previous government already knew.
That is waste of another kind.
It is also a reason why government institutions sometimes appear permanently young despite their age.
The names change. The committees change. The language changes. Yet the same problems return.
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Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of plans. It suffers from a shortage of institutional mechanisms strong enough to distinguish between a policy that should be preserved, one that should be corrected and one that should be abandoned.
That distinction should not be left entirely to political discretion.
Before a government terminates an inherited programme, there should be an institutional examination of what has been achieved, what remains unfinished, what has been spent and what it would cost to replace the programme. If a policy is to be reversed, the public should be able to understand why.
Otherwise, every change begins to look like politics.
And when citizens begin to suspect that policies survive or die according to who occupies an office rather than according to evidence, public confidence suffers.
The road to development is rarely straight. It requires correction, adaptation and sometimes an honest admission that something has gone wrong. But a country that is constantly beginning again never accumulates enough institutional experience to become good at finishing.
This is where institutional memory becomes a question of public trust.
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A citizen who has adjusted his business to a government regulation, an investor who has committed capital because of a government incentive, a contractor who has mobilised to a public project and a farmer who has changed his production plans because of an agricultural policy are not dealing with government as an abstraction.
They are making decisions based on promises.
When those promises are repeatedly altered without explanation, people learn to wait.
The investor waits. The contractor waits. The community waits. The civil servant waits for the next directive.
Eventually the country develops a culture in which nobody wants to commit fully to anything because everybody is watching for the next government announcement.
That is a dangerous place for a developing economy to find itself.
Continuity, however, must not become another excuse for protecting failure.
There are enough abandoned or badly conceived projects in Nigeria to demonstrate that simply continuing yesterday’s decisions is not governance. Some policies deserve to end. Some contracts should be reviewed. Some institutions have outlived their usefulness. Some programmes should never have been started.
The issue is the quality of the decision.
A mature state does not ask whether a policy belongs to the previous administration. It asks whether the policy serves the public interest.
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That is the standard that should survive changes of government.
There are encouraging signs that the present administration understands the importance of continuity. The Renewed Hope National Development Plan for 2026 to 2030 is presented as a framework for consolidating ongoing reforms and sustaining the development trajectory rather than beginning entirely from scratch.
But the real test will come later, when another administration takes over.
Will it inherit the plan as a national instrument or treat it as the property of the government that produced it?
That is where Nigeria’s development culture must change.
A country cannot build long term prosperity if every political transition becomes an invitation to clear the table.
The road to development is rarely straight. It requires correction, adaptation and sometimes an honest admission that something has gone wrong. But a country that is constantly beginning again never accumulates enough institutional experience to become good at finishing.
And finishing matters.
The bridge that opens is more valuable than the bridge announced.
The power project that generates electricity matters more than the policy document that promised it.
The road completed matters more than the contract award ceremony.
The industrial policy that survives long enough for businesses to plan around it matters more than the launch of another committee.
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Nigeria should therefore begin to measure governments not simply by what they announce, but by what they inherit, improve and leave standing for whoever comes next.
That would be a healthier definition of continuity.
It would also force every new administration to confront an uncomfortable truth: the country does not begin again when a new government takes office.
Nigeria is already in motion.
Every generation inherits unfinished work.
The responsibility of government is to know what deserves to be carried forward, what must be repaired and what must be left behind.
Anything else leaves the nation forever paying for the privilege of starting over.
Ogundipe, public affairs analyst and former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists, writes this column every Monday.
