NGScorecard

Stabilise federal finances after the 2014-15 oil price shock, implement the Treasury Single Account, and lead fiscal responses to the 2016 recession.

Adeosun oversaw the TSA rollout and early Paris Club refund disbursements to states, and helped negotiate Nigeria's exit from the 2016 recession. Her tenure ended abruptly in September 2018 when investigative journalism site Premium Times revealed she had forged her NYSC exemption certificate to avoid mandatory national service decades earlier. She resigned rather than face removal.

Restore credibility to the finance ministry after Adeosun's exit, manage fiscal policy through the 2020 recession, and coordinate the Economic Sustainability Plan and Finance Act reforms.

Ahmed steered the country through the COVID-19-triggered 2020 recession and oversaw four consecutive annual Finance Acts that made incremental tax and fiscal reforms. Debt service consumed a rapidly rising share of revenue through her tenure — reaching close to 90% by 2022 on some estimates — and the naira's multiple-exchange-rate distortion was never resolved on her watch.

Deliver Nigeria's biggest rail infrastructure push in decades, including standard-gauge lines connecting major cities and ports.

Amaechi's ministry delivered the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail (commercial service from 2021), extended the Abuja-Kaduna line, and completed the Itakpe-Warri line — the most visible infrastructure wins of the Buhari era. However, projects consistently ran years behind original schedules and well over initial cost estimates, and the long-promised Lagos-Calabar coastal rail and Ibadan-Kano extension remained largely unbuilt by the end of the term.

Combine oversight of the power, works, and housing portfolios to coordinate infrastructure delivery, then focus on federal road rehabilitation and the National Housing Programme after the ministry was split in 2019.

Fashola's ministry rehabilitated sections of major federal highways and advanced the Second Niger Bridge to near-completion, and the National Housing Programme delivered several thousand units across pilot states. Average electricity delivered to the national grid barely moved during his tenure over the power portfolio, and metering gaps for consumers remained a chronic, unresolved complaint throughout.

Resolve chronic disputes with university unions, improve funding for basic and tertiary education, and modernise Nigeria's education infrastructure.

Adamu's eight-year tenure was marked by repeated, prolonged ASUU strikes — including a roughly eight-month nationwide university shutdown in 2020 and a further nine-month strike in 2022 — driven by unresolved funding and welfare disputes that were never durably settled. Out-of-school children numbers, already among the world's highest, continued to rise on UNICEF and UBEC estimates across his tenure.

Drive telecom sector growth, expand broadband penetration, and lead the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy.

Pantami's tenure saw the telecom sector's GDP contribution grow and broadband penetration rise from roughly 33% to over 40%. He also enforced the controversial NIN-SIM linkage mandate from December 2020. In 2021, past sermons resurfaced in which he had expressed extremist and antisemitic views years earlier as a preacher; he apologised but resisted calls to resign, and Buhari retained him for the rest of the term despite US and UK travel restriction reports.

Manage labour relations across the public sector, negotiate the national minimum wage, and mediate recurring health-worker and civil-service strikes.

Ngige presided over the 2019 increase of the minimum wage to ₦30,000, but his tenure was defined by a near-constant cycle of resident doctors' (NARD), health workers' (JOHESU), and other public-sector strikes that recurred almost annually, often over unimplemented prior agreements. Critics said the ministry repeatedly signed strike-ending memoranda that were not subsequently honoured by government, feeding the same disputes to resurface within months.

Coordinate the National Social Investment Programmes (N-Power, conditional cash transfers, school feeding) and lead humanitarian response in the North-East and to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ministry oversaw the transfer of the social investment programmes from the Vice President's office in 2019. Its most damaging episode came in October 2020, when warehouses in several states were found stocked with undistributed COVID-19 palliatives during the #EndSARS unrest, and looted by the public — a stark symbol of distribution failure that the ministry never fully accounted for publicly.

Manage government communications, coordinate the response to disinformation, and represent the administration's record to the public and international press.

Mohammed was the administration's most consistent public defender across two terms, but his tenure coincided with a marked decline in Nigeria's press freedom ranking, the 2021 Twitter ban he helped announce and defend, and the arrest of journalists during periods of civil unrest including the #EndSARS protests. His public statements minimising the scale of insecurity and economic hardship were frequently disputed by independent data from the NBS and international monitors.

Lead federal prosecution of corruption cases, coordinate asset recovery efforts, and provide legal guidance across government, including on the OPL 245 (Malabu) oil block dispute inherited from prior administrations.

Malami's eight years saw persistent criticism over slow-moving corruption prosecutions, controversial plea-bargain settlements that returned only a fraction of allegedly stolen sums, and his office's handling of the long-running OPL 245 Malabu scandal, in which Nigeria ultimately lost related international arbitration and court proceedings against Shell and Eni rather than recovering the disputed $1.3 billion. Transparency groups repeatedly flagged his ministry as a bottleneck for asset recovery cases referred by the EFCC and ICPC.