Business
Nigeria’s Poor Approach To Budget Worries NGO
Executive Director, Civil Resources Development and Documentation Centre (CIRDDOC), an NGO, Mrs Oby Nwankwo, on Sunday, decried poor approach to budget process in the country.
Nwankwo made the observation in Abuja at the West African launch of the 2010 Open Index organised by CIRDDOC and the International Budget Partnership (IBP) Washington DC in collaboration with ECOWAS.
She said that the launch was one of a series projected by the organisation aimed at achieving good governance as well as to seek for enthronement of transparent budget process at all levels in the country.
“The whole focus of the project is on the global assessment level of budget transparency in the 94 countries of which Nigeria is a member and also the group of 93 questions that member country researchers worked with to get information and response.”
“By the end of the day, the team of consultants in Washington will look at the information that we have and allocate marks or grade people according to a set criteria,’’ Nwankwo added.
The CIRDDOC boss said that Nigeria as at 2006 budget survey had scored 19 points out of a hundred while in 2008 budget process Nigeria stepped up to 20 points and stepped down to 18 with the loss of two points.
“It is obvious that Nigeria is not performing well from the way the budget process has been packaged and with the criteria used in arriving at the result,” she said.
She also said that there were minimum standards that a country must comply with in order to make her budget transparent, one of which was that eight of the budget documents must be produced and published.
Nwankwo said that Nigeria produced most of these documents but failed to publish them, saying that it was of no use if produced and left on the shelf.
She further said that another area the country had poorly faired in terms of budget process was the budget audit that was expected to be carried out at the end of every budget year in order to evaluate the impact and inform the citizens of her performance level.
She said that “though reports are audited but are rather kept in offices as official secret act and unless Nigeria meets certain minimum standards it won’t get to the future transparency level’’.
Nwankwo said that with the recommendations made by Transparency International, also an NGO, and CIRDDOC the country’s political will would be developed in order to achieve the budget transparency target.
Cornerstone of Financial Services
A survey of more than 1 000 global finance leaders undertaken by digital payment network Ripple shows that 72% of respondents believe they need to offer a digital asset solution to remain competitive.
According to Ripple, leaders from the banking, fintech, corporate and asset management sector have made it clear that the “digital asset revolution is happening now”.
“Digital assets are quickly becoming a cornerstone of financial services, underpinned by progressive regulation, growing interest from Tier-1 banks, a steady consumer shift from banks to fintech providers, and booming stablecoin adoption,” Ripple says.
The survey was conducted in early 2026 and the findings released in March.
Stablecoin Boon or Bane?
Ripple has experienced significant success in the stablecoin sector since launching its Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin in 2024.
With a market cap of $1.56 billion, it is considered a major regulated player in the market.
No doubt the platform was pleased to learn through its own survey that financial leaders were most bullish about stablecoins.
Roughly three-quarters of respondents believed they could boost cash-flow efficiency and unlock trapped working capital.
Ripple noted that finance leaders were thinking about stablecoins as more than “just a new way to execute payments”; instead, they viewed them as effective tools for treasury management.
In March 2026, Ripple began testing a new trade finance model built around RLUSD in a bid to increase the speed of cross-border payments.
The pilot initiative, developed alongside supply chain finance company Unloq [https://unloq.com], is running on the XRP Ledger inside a testing framework developed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
The Asian city-state is one of the platform’s biggest growth markets.
The idea behind the project is to see whether stablecoin-based settlement can streamline trade finance, too often hampered by reliance on intermediaries and slow reconciliation.
The only potential drawback is that if the initiative takes off, the Ripple to USD price could be negatively affected.
Ripple has always championed its native XRP token as a bridge asset, the “middleman” in the process of a financial institution turning dollars in the US into pounds in the UK, for example.
Ripple converts dollars into XRP and then back into pounds.
If RLUSD can do exactly the same thing, questions will be asked about XRP’s relevance.
That is a bridge Ripple will have to cross if it gets to that point.
Tokenisation Partners
Another interesting finding from Ripple’s survey is that most banks and asset managers are seeking tokenisation partners to help execute their strategies.
Some 89% of respondents said digital asset storage and custody were top priority. “Token servicing/lifecycle management also ranks highly for banks at 82%, while asset managers place greater emphasis on primary distribution at 80%,” Ripple found.
The survey also revealed that just more than half of fintechs and financial institutions want an infrastructure provider that can offer a “one-stop-shop solution”. This rose to 71% among corporate financial leaders.
Ripple attributes this to institutions and firms wanting uncomplicated, cohesive systems.
Infrastructure Rules
In its final analysis, Ripple says companies across the board are looking for partners and solutions that are “secure, compliant, battle-tested and that enable growth and execution”.
“The message is clear: infrastructure decisions made today will shape competitive positioning tomorrow.”
No surprise that this is precisely where Ripple is placing much of its focus.