The intelligence report is a wake-up call on the states
The health of a federation is measured by the state of the constituent units. This is exactly why the recently released State Performance Index (pSPI) by a leading business and management consulting firm, Phillips Consulting, matters. Dubbed a ‘Momentum Index’, it is a comprehensive intelligence report designed to transform how governments, investors, development partners, policymakers, researchers, businesses, and citizens understand and evaluate state-level performance across Nigeria. It is an innovative framework that measures how states are progressing over time, relative to the national average in the period under review, with positive scores indicating above-average progress and negative scores reflecting slower imprisonment. This is measured based on five indicators: citizen satisfaction, debt sustainability, revenue growth, fiscal transparency, and internally-generated revenue relative to federal allocations.
As a benchmark for measuring governance, performance, and development across the 36 states in the country, the 2026 Momentum Index ranks Enugu as the fastest-improving state. Coming right behind Enugu to complete the top five are Jigawa, Abia, Osun and Kano in that order. Many of the 33 surveyed states did not do well on the Index. According to the report, the emergence of Enugu as the fastest-improving state reflects deliberate governance, strong fiscal discipline, and sustained implementation of reforms. The state is said to have witnessed deliberate reforms and investment in education, security, health, transport, housing, agriculture, road infrastructure, among others.
Facts emerging from the Momentum Index reveal that more money does not necessarily translate to a better life for the people. Instead, as pointed out in the report, “Momentum flows to states that govern deliberately, not those that inherit wealth.”
Whereas Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) allocation to states shot up by 118 per cent between 2022 and 2025 due mainly to the removal of fuel subsidy and merging of the foreign exchange rates, the exponential rise in the receipts from Abuja has not reflected on the lives of the people. Also instructive is the fact that the five South East states recorded the strongest regional momentum, well ahead of the oil-rich states of the South South. This challenges the usual impression about the link between natural resource wealth and development. It reinforces the fact that good governance trumps sheer revenue resources.
We agree with the report that “Spending is a number; progress is an outcome.” The gap between rising government receipts and citizens’ experience is a reflection of the quality of governance rather than the size of state budgets. For instance, among other good governance factors, Enugu’s leap was made possible not just by the progressively historic sizes of the 2024, 2025, and 2026 state budgets, but mainly by a strategic shift in the state’s Capital Expenditure and Recurrent Expenditure ratios to fund socioeconomic infrastructure. Also significant is the exponential rise in the state’s Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) from N26.8 billion in 2022 to N496.7 billion in 2025. This, according to the report, has been made possible by painstaking reforms implementation that saw to the introduction of technology, ban on cash payment, and strengthening of human capital.
What the Momentum Index reveals is that many of the states need to develop cost-effective strategies to increase internal revenue, cut down on overhead costs, and enthrone fiscal discipline and transparency. The desired economic growth in the states, and indeed in the country, can only be achieved if the recurrent expenditure component is optimised while the spending component on capital infrastructure is prioritised. We commend Phillips Consulting for the idea. The purpose, we believe, is not to indict any state administration, but to spur them to action. That way, they can engage in more intensive peer review to share ideas and learn from one another in their respective areas of comparative advantage.