Resetting Enugu: 2026 Budget and New Economic Imagination

Jeff Ukachukwu

If you stand in Ogbete Main Market long enough, you can almost feel the story of Enugu changing around you. There was a time when the city moved to a single rhythm: Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) Day. People spoke of “what came from Abuja” the way farmers talk about rain. Development was episodic – a road patched here, a repainted school block there, a borehole that worked for one season and died quietly after the commissioning plaque had faded. The government behaved like a caretaker, not a builder. Enugu, like many states, lived from allocation to allocation, from hand to mouth, trapped in a survival mindset.

What is unfolding now is something different – and frankly audacious: an economic reset that inspires hope. When Governor Peter Mbah walked into the House of Assembly with a 2026 budget of about N1.62 trillion, it wasn’t just the size that jarred people; it was what it implied. A 66.5 per cent jump from the previous year is a statement of confidence. More revealing than the headline figure is the structure: 80 per cent of the budget is devoted to capital expenditure and 20 per cent to recurrent expenditure. In a political culture where salaries and overheads usually swallow most of the pie, that ratio is a quiet revolt. It says, in effect, we are done merely keeping the lights on; we are now wiring the future. Instructively, it was not his first time – 79 per cent capital expenditure to 21 per cent recurrent expenditure in 2024 and 86 per cent to 14 per cent in 2025.

Of course, resets never begin with applause; they begin with doubt. When this administration started talking about a $30 billion state economy, AI-supported security, smart schools in every ward, a government driven more by internally generated revenue (IGR) than by FAAC, most people reacted the way long-disappointed citizens do – with guarded politeness. The trader pushing a wheelbarrow through Ogbete, the mechanic in Abakpa, the farmer in Nkanu East still woke up every morning to broken roads, dry taps, fragile security and public institutions that felt distant and unreliable. Big talk had come and gone before.

But has Enugu resolved its problems? It hasn’t. What has changed is that you can now attach numbers and concrete images to the rhetoric. Over 1,000 kilometres of roads have reportedly been completed or fixed, showing tangible progress. 260 Smart Green Primary Schools are at completion or near completion, one in every ward, reflecting real investment. 260 Type-2 Primary Healthcare Centres, designed to run 24 hours and powered by solar, are on stream. New state-of-the-art bus terminals at Holy Ghost, Abakpa, Garriki and Nsukka have begun to impose order on chaotic transport flows. Water now runs again in many parts of Enugu from the 9th Mile and Oji River Schemes after decades of scarcity. It is still work in progress. An intelligence-led security network has made Monday markets feel normal instead of a suicidal mission, giving citizens a sense of safety and stability.

The fiscal story matches the physical one. In 2025, Enugu worked with a budget of about N971 billion and is on track to implement roughly 83 per cent of it. About N806 billion will have been spent by year-end, representing around 97.5 per cent of all funds that actually came into the state. FAAC inflows, projected at N150 billion, came in closer to N230 billion. IGR is set to exceed N400 billion – the highest in the state’s history and more than triple the previous year’s figure. These are not the statistics of a complacent government; they are the footprint of a state stretching itself and, for the most part, holding its balance.

None of this came without pain. Economic resets are rarely romantic. Expanding the tax net, automating payments, insisting on digital receipts, shutting down leakages and informal “arrangements” – all of this stung. For many months, citizens felt the enforcement before they saw the benefits. Traders in Ogbete and Abakpa heard talk of smart schools and modern hospitals, but still battled the same dust, the same potholes, the same petty officialdom. The natural question was, “When will all this touch my own life?” If that question feels less sharp now, it is because some of the promised changes have finally become touchable. Ask residents of Idaw River, New Haven, New Layout, among a host of others.

The most radical choice buried in all these numbers may be the one that has attracted the least drama: the decision to put education at the centre of the reset. Thrice in a row, Enugu has devoted over 30 per cent of its entire budget to education – 32 per cent in 2024, 33 per cent in 2025, and now 32.27 per in 2026. In a country where education is often the first line to be trimmed when revenues fall, this is a deliberate act of defiance. The 260 Smart Green Schools across are not just about beauty; they represent a different assumption about what a child in a village classroom deserves – digital tools, laboratories, stable power, and teachers prepared for a tech-driven curriculum. The next movement is already queued in the 2026 budget: Smart Secondary Schools and serious Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) Colleges that treat skills as a core economic asset. An imposing example is now standing magnificently on the hitherto ruins of Government Technical School, GTC, Enugu. Behind this is a stark calculation: whatever Enugu spends on education today is modest compared to the future cost of an army of out-of-school, unemployable young people.

The same move from fragments to systems is visible in other sectors. Agriculture is being reimagined from scattered interventions into a network of 260 Farm Estates, every 200 hectares, with central warehouses, tractor sheds, irrigation, power and water – connected to a 300,000-hectare Land Bank and a Tractor Assembly Plant. This is an attempt to drag farming out of subsistence and into scale and value addition. Housing, with more than 15 per cent of the budget, is not treated as a side project: 15,000 mass housing units are planned for 2026 as the first phase of a 30,000-unit target, backed by the New Enugu Smart City whose infrastructure is expected to be completed next year and projected to generate over N300 billion through its development assets. Tourism, often dismissed as soft spending, is being structured as a real industry: the completion of the ongoing International Conference Centre 5-Star Hotel, the completion/upgrade of Awhum, Okpatu, Nsude, Ngwo and Akwuke tourism sites, and the rebirth of Awgu Games Village – plus novel attractions like Nigeria’s first zip-line – are all pieces of a visitor economy designed to put money in the hands of hoteliers, transporters, artisans and creatives.

Infrastructure is the spine tying this together. Roads are not just about ease of movement; they are arteries for commerce. Strategic routes like the Owo–Ubahu–Amankanu–Neke–Ikem dual carriageway, the Abakpa Nike–Ugwogo–Ekwegbe–Opi–Nsukka corridor and the Enugu–Abakaliki expressway are economic statements as much as engineering projects. The plan to pave 1,200 urban roads in 2026 and extend rural networks so that every local government has at least one major project is an attempt to weave the state into a single economic space rather than a map of disconnected pockets. Bus terminals at Holy Ghost, Abakpa, Garriki, Nsukka – and new ones planned in Emene, Udi, Awgu, 4-Corners and Obollo Afor – along with CNG buses, 2,000 city taxis and an Enugu Air fleet targeted at 20 aircraft are the practical expressions of a belief that if people and goods move better, money moves better.

Yet the most decisive part of this reset may be the least visible: the work on institutions and trust. The Enugu State Citizens’ Charter is a simple but powerful gesture – a written promise of service standards against which government can be measured. Digitised land records and revenue platforms, automated receipts, bank-linked payment systems, stricter procurement rules, performance-based budgeting – these are the unglamorous reforms that determine whether big budgets leak away or translate into real projects. The administration has been unusually frank about capacity: the structures built to manage N200 billion annually are not automatically fit to handle over a trillion. Rapid recruitment and expansion of oversight units come with risks of politicisation, lowered standards and pressure to cut corners. Whether those risks are resisted or indulged will show up not in press releases but in the quality of projects and services delivered.

All of this sits on the bedrock of security. A tech-driven, intelligence-led framework, anchored in a central Command and Control Centre and supported by AI-driven surveillance and coordinated response units, has significantly reduced violent crime. The governor put the reduction at 30 per cent. While some may want to debate the precise percentage, the ordinary people recognise something simpler: Monday markets are back, travel at dawn or dusk feels less reckless, most important events hold on Mondays, and investors can visit without treating each trip as a gamble. Without this level of safety, the talk of tourism, industrial parks, farm estates and smart cities would be pipe dreams.

To take the reset seriously, however, is also to take its risks seriously. In 2025, Enugu achieved about 85 per cent of its total projected inflows, with capital receipts underperforming because some of the assets intended to generate them were still under construction. The 2026 budget now leans heavily on precisely those assets – the International Conference Centre, new terminals, Hotel Presidential, revived industries, New Enugu City – to generate the huge sums from non-FAAC sources. These are real projects, but they exist in a real economy subject to shocks: property markets can slow, conference and tourist flows can dry up, and national headwinds can dampen optimism.

Even with those uncertainties, it is hard to deny that something fundamental has shifted in Enugu. “Tomorrow is here” is the administration’s mantra. In truth, tomorrow arrives in fragments: a smart classroom where there was once a rickety structure, a rural clinic that works at midnight, a farmer using mechanisation for the first time, a trader who does not shut her stall in fear. Enugu’s economic reset is still an experiment –imperfect, incomplete. But for the first time in a long while, the state is not waiting passively for its future to be decided in Abuja. It is trying, with unusual intensity, to build that future with its own hands, its own tools and its own imagination.

Dr. Ukachukwu, a public affairs analyst, writes from jeffukagmail.com