Do the arithmetic and the number becomes almost insulting. The 2026 Appropriation Act set aside N8.2 billion for issues affecting persons with disabilities in Nigeria. The country has more than 30 million people living with a disability.
That works out to roughly N273 per person. For an entire year. For everything — the eye surgery, the wheelchair, the school fees, the transport, the assistive device that never arrives.
Three people who track how Nigeria spends its money looked at the figure and reached for the same word: inadequate.
Where The N8.2bn Actually Goes
The headline number is the part that travels. The breakdown is the part that shows how the money was actually thought about, and it is worth reading carefully.
- N2.0044bn for awareness campaigns, programmes and policy development — the largest single share.
- N1.86bn for construction.
- N1.413bn for skills acquisition.
Read that list again and the first problem becomes obvious. The single biggest line item is not treatment, not devices and not transport. It is awareness, policy and the machinery around awareness and policy. That is not necessarily wrong — rules and coordination do cost money — but it does explain why the figure feels hollow to the people it was meant to reach.
The People Who Spoke
Blessing Oladunjoye: N273 is not a plan
Blessing Oladunjoye of BOFIM and BO News was blunt about what N8.2bn buys for 30 million people. She said the amount might look substantial on paper but was nowhere near enough for what is actually required: inclusive education, healthcare, assistive devices and accessible transportation.
Her sharpest point was about cost that does not appear in any budget. A person with a disability who cannot walk pays for a guide. A person with a disability who cannot use public transport pays for a taxi. That money comes from the same household budget as everything else, and it is the money that actually determines whether a person gets to school, to work or to the market.
She also pushed back on the idea that disability funding should sit with one agency, arguing that disability is a cross-cutting issue that touches education, health, transport and labour. If one ministry owns the budget, then every other ministry can treat disability as somebody else’s problem.
Adebukola Adebayo: the policies exist, the money does not
Adebukola Adebayo, who works on disability-inclusive development, took a different route to the same conclusion. He pointed out how much has actually been built: Nigeria has a national disability law, nearly thirty of the thirty-six states have enacted their own disability laws, and roughly twenty-two or twenty-three have gone further and established dedicated disability agencies.
And then he went straight to the hole in the system. A study covering 2022 and 2023 found that less than N5bn was budgeted nationwide for more than 30 million persons with disabilities. Some state disability agencies receive less than N1bn a year, and cannot access even a fraction of that.
“It’s not the lack of policies, but it’s the lack of budget,” he said.
He also raised the figure that ought to end the argument in anybody’s mind: according to UNICEF, only three per cent of children with disabilities in Nigeria attend school.
The corruption example nobody can unhear
Adebayo did not leave it at budget lines. He described a case where a supplier delivered a used vehicle under an assistive devices contract. It is the kind of detail that turns a dry budget debate into something people remember, and it is precisely why he asked for published procurement records rather than good intentions.
Oluwatimilehin Olugbemi: you cannot track what you cannot name
Oluwatimilehin Olugbemi of BudgIT focused on a technical problem that is, in truth, a political one. Publishing an allocation tells you nothing about what happened to the money. You need the scope of the projects, the releases, the actual expenditure, the procurement records and the number of people who actually received something.
He also identified why the figures are so hard to follow. Budget line items bundle persons with disabilities together with other vulnerable groups — N250m in Osun State, for instance, covers vulnerable people, widows, persons with disabilities and the elderly in a single line. With no codes attached, there is no way to isolate what disability funding actually delivered.
What The Experts Are Asking For
None of the three asked for pity. That was the point Adebayo made when he urged journalists to report disability as a human rights and development issue rather than as a charity matter. The asks are structural:
- A disability desk officer or unit in every ministry, department and agency.
- Real collaboration with Organisations of Persons with Disabilities during budget consultations, before the numbers are fixed.
- Published releases, expenditure and procurement records, and a count of beneficiaries reached.
- Journalists and auditors comparing approved allocations against what was actually spent, and checking on the ground.
- Treating disability funding as an investment with a return, not a handout.
For context on how quickly public money moves and how carefully it has to be watched, the recent exchanges over federal borrowing and loan repayments have shown just how closely watched the books have become.
And for the households on the receiving end, the everyday version of this argument is captured in our guide to surviving on a student budget in Nigeria — because a family managing a disability, a school fee and transport on one income is already solving the allocation problem themselves, without any of the support the appropriation was meant to provide.
It is not only households that absorb the shortfall. The new academic session opened with classrooms and teachers in short supply, so the inclusive education line is competing with a general education crisis rather than filling a gap. And the macroeconomic picture is not generous either, with debate over the N1 million minimum wage already stretching the limits of what the budget can carry. A N8.2bn line for 30 million people is not being squeezed by an accident of policy. It is competing for scraps.
The Wider Point
There is a reason this story keeps recurring in budget cycles. Nigeria has built the legal and institutional architecture for disability inclusion with real speed, and the architecture has produced very little, because a law costs nothing to pass and a surgery costs a great deal to deliver.
Whether N8.2bn rises next year is genuinely uncertain. What is certain is that N273 per person, per year, is not the price of inclusion. It is the price of a line item.
Conclusion
The pattern here is one Nigerians recognise across many sectors: a policy exists, an agency exists, a budget line exists, and then the money stops on its way to the person it was meant for. The gap between the three per cent of disabled children in school and the ninety-seven per cent who are not is a budget gap before it is an attitude gap.
The experts made a practical request that is easy to honour: publish the details. Releases, expenditure, procurement, beneficiaries. A figure that can be checked is worth more than a speech, and the naira at the end of it is worth more than both.
