Governing blind: Nigeria’s costly aversion to policy evaluation

Drive along almost any federal highway in Nigeria and the evidence stands in plain sight: skeletal frames of half-built hospitals, rusting gantries of stalled power projects, schools that never opened. The Chartered Institute of Project Managers of Nigeria put the value of abandoned projects at over N17 trillion in 2024 — “still counting,” in its own grim phrase — and by November 2025 the House of Representatives had opened an investigation into abandoned federal properties and projects estimated at more than N20 trillion. A Presidential Projects Assessment Committee, set up as far back as 2011, identified 11,886 abandoned federal projects that would cost an estimated N7.78 trillion to complete — and lawmakers have since cited reports suggesting that roughly six in ten of all projects initiated since independence were never finished. The economist Bismarck Rewane has called the country a “morgue of abandoned projects”. These are not merely engineering failures. They are the visible monuments to an invisible deficit: Nigeria’s chronic refusal to evaluate its own policies, and its deeper refusal to act on evidence even when it exists.

Every modern government makes mistakes. What distinguishes well-governed states is not that they avoid error, but that they detect it early, learn from it, and correct course. That feedback loop — design, implement, evaluate, adjust — is the elementary physiology of effective governance. In Nigeria, the loop is broken at both ends. Policies are launched without ex-ante appraisal of whether they can plausibly work, and terminated (or quietly forgotten) without ex-post evaluation of whether they did. The result is a state that governs blind: unable to distinguish its successes from its failures, doomed to repeat the latter and unable to replicate the former.

Consider the pattern. A new administration arrives, discards its predecessor’s flagship programmes — often unexamined — and launches its own, with fresh acronyms and familiar ambitions. Youth employment schemes, social investment programmes, agricultural interventions and subsidy regimes have each cycled through this ritual of birth, fanfare and abandonment. Rarely does anyone in authority pause to ask the two questions on which rational policy depends: Did the last one work? And how do we know?

It is not that Nigeria lacks the institutional paperwork. The federal government launched a National Monitoring and Evaluation Policy in August 2022, promising evidence-based policymaking, results-oriented budgeting and a government-wide evaluation system. On paper it is a respectable document, with seven guiding principles and an implementation framework. In practice, scholars of Nigerian public administration observe that the policy has yet to be implemented across ministries, departments and agencies, and has not cascaded to states and local governments. Nigeria, in short, has a policy on evaluation but no culture of it — a certificate of good intentions filed away in the same cabinet as the reforms it was meant to discipline.

The costs of this amnesia are not abstract. When policies are neither appraised before launch nor evaluated after, three pathologies follow. First, resources flow to programmes on the strength of political sponsorship rather than demonstrated results, which is how a country with Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit accumulates N20 trillion in abandoned projects. The pattern reaches deep into local service delivery: BudgIT’s Tracka report for 2024/2025, unveiled in February 2026, tracked 2,760 federally funded capital projects and found only about half completed; in Benue, the worst performer, 40 per cent were never executed at all, and five states alone accounted for 97.5 per cent of the abandoned works — some N7.8 billion in mobilisation fees paid to contractors who then vanished. BudgIT’s own executive director drew the obvious lesson: evaluation is weak, he noted, and that is why value for money remains elusive. Second, failures are repeated serially, because the institutional memory that evaluation creates simply does not exist; each new intervention starts from zero. Third, public trust corrodes — and the human stakes keep rising. The World Bank estimates that an additional 10 million Nigerians fell into extreme poverty in 2025 alone, taking the share of the population below the international poverty line to 50.9 per cent, and its prescription is telling: a better funded and more effective social protection system. Effectiveness cannot be legislated; it can only be discovered — and evaluation is the instrument of discovery. Citizens who watch programme after programme launched with fanfare and buried in silence draw the rational conclusion that government promises are theatre.

None of this is inevitable, and Nigeria needs not look to Scandinavia for proof. Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) independently evaluates federal social programmes, publishes the results, and — crucially — operates a four-tier mechanism that converts findings into prioritised improvement plans, publicly disseminated to force follow-through. South Africa’s Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, established in the Presidency in 2010, runs a national evaluation system in which findings go to Cabinet and are made public; within its first years, evaluations covering roughly $5 billion of expenditure were already showing significant influence on the programmes concerned, and by 2016 evaluation results were feeding directly into the national budget process. Colombia, Chile, Uganda and Benin have built comparable systems. These are not rich countries indulging a technocratic hobby. They are middle- and lower-middle-income states that concluded, sensibly, that they were too poor not to know what works.

The common architecture is instructive: a central evaluation unit with political weight (typically in the presidency); a rolling national evaluation plan that selects major policies for rigorous assessment; mandatory publication of findings; and — the step most systems neglect — a binding improvement-plan mechanism that obliges implementing agencies to respond. Evaluation without consequence is decoration. The countries that benefit are those that wired the findings into budgets and cabinet decisions.

Sceptics will object that Nigeria’s problem is not knowledge but will — that politicians know perfectly well which programmes fail and sustain them anyway, for patronage. There is force in this. Evaluation is no vaccine against corruption, and a rigorous impact assessment can be shelved as easily as a highway project. But the objection proves less than it seems. Where evaluation findings are published by law, the political price of ignoring them rises: opposition politicians, journalists, civil society and BudgIT-style fiscal watchdogs acquire ammunition they currently lack. Transparency does not guarantee good behaviour; it raises its probability and lowers the cost of accountability. The perfect should not be allowed to veto the useful.

The government itself, notably, has begun to feel the absence of credible evaluation. When legislators queried low budget-execution rates during the 2026 budget deliberations, the Finance Ministry protested in March 2026 that capital projects were “ongoing, not abandoned,” pointing to N11.59 trillion in capital expenditure for 2024 — about 84 per cent budget performance — and roughly N11.7 trillion for 2025. Perhaps so. But the very dispute illustrates the problem: in the absence of independent, published evaluations, claims about what public spending is actually achieving reduce to a contest of press statements. An institutionalised evaluation system would settle such arguments with evidence rather than assertion — which is precisely why serious governments build one.

Others will plead cost. Yet South Africa’s entire evaluation and research unit ran on roughly $2 million a year in its formative period — a rounding error against the N20 trillion already sunk into abandoned projects. Evaluation is among the cheapest insurance a government can buy. The expensive option is the status quo.

What, concretely, should Nigeria do? First, give the National M&E Policy teeth: a legal mandate, a dedicated budget line, and a home with genuine presidential authority rather than a departmental afterthought. Second, adopt a national evaluation plan that subjects every flagship programme — social investment, subsidy reform, security spending — to independent assessment on a published timetable. Third, legislate publication: evaluation reports should enter the public domain as a matter of course, not ministerial discretion. Fourth, and most important, bind findings to money — no renewal of a major programme’s budget without an evaluation and a documented management response. Fifth, invest in the evaluation profession itself, in universities and the civil service, so that demand for evidence meets a domestic supply of people able to produce it.

None of this is glamorous. No ribbon is cut when a feedback loop is closed. But the alternative is on display along every federal highway: a nation of magnificent foundations and missing roofs, governed by hunch, ambushed repeatedly by consequences it never troubled to predict and never paused to understand. A state that will not examine its own record has chosen, in effect, to keep governing blind. Nigeria can no longer afford the luxury of not knowing.

Dr Zakari, mni, is a former Director of the National Monitoring and Evaluation Department and CEO of Tazaar Management Consultants Ltd.

UPDATE NEWS:

Nigerians can now invest ₦2.5 million on premium domains and profit about ₦17-₦25 million. All earnings paid in US Dollars. Rather than wonder,

click here to find out how it works.