N58.47 trillion passed today. The assumptions expired three weeks ago.

Nigeria's Senate passed the 2026 budget today. N58.47 trillion. Named, with a straight face, the "Budget of Consolidation, Renewed Resilience, and Shared Prosperity."

The whole thing is built on oil at $64.85 per barrel.

Oil is trading above $100 right now. Has been for two weeks. For Nigeria — an oil producer — that's not a budget crisis. That's a windfall. Every barrel sold above $64.85 is money the budget didn't account for. At current prices, that's more than $35 extra per barrel flowing into federation accounts.

So the question isn't whether the money is there. It is. The question is what happens to it.

In theory, there's a process for exactly this. Most serious economies have a supplementary budget mechanism — a formal revision of revenue projections, adjusted expenditure, back to the legislature. Buhari did it in 2016 when oil crashed below the benchmark. He did it again in 2020. Nigeria has the legal framework for the reverse too. The Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 and Section 318 of the Constitution require the government to revise its Medium Term Expenditure Framework when macroeconomic assumptions change materially. A windfall triggers it just as a shortfall does. That's not advisory language. It's supposed to be mandatory.

In practice, it rarely happens. Extra oil revenue in Nigeria tends to arrive, circulate, and disappear before anyone can account for it. The Excess Crude Account was supposed to capture windfalls. It's been consistently raided, disputed, and drained. The question for the next few weeks is whether Tinubu's government presents a supplementary budget that accounts for the higher oil price — directing the surplus into the N23.85 trillion deficit, infrastructure, or debt servicing — or whether the windfall quietly vanishes while petrol stays at N1,300 at the pump.

An oil price shock that enriches the government and punishes the consumer at the same time is not an accident. It's a system.

It gets more specific. Defence gets the single largest allocation — N5.41 trillion. More than education (N3.52 trillion) and health (N2.48 trillion) combined. The day after Maiduguri's worst civilian bombing in five years. The budget is spending on the military and the military still couldn't hold the market.

There's a N23.85 trillion deficit too. That gap has to be borrowed. And borrowing gets more expensive when the naira is under pressure from a global oil shock.

The senators called it historic. It probably is. Just not in the way they meant.