Fiscal technology reforms: The top-down angle

By Chibueze Onyekpere
In February 2026, the media ran a review marking a decade since Nigeria’s Treasury Single Account (TSA) went fully live, crediting it with pulling roughly N3trillion in idle government funds out of commercial banks where it had been sitting while the government itself borrowed at high interest to cover salaries and projects. It is, on its face, an absurd image: a government paying interest to borrow money it already owned, because nobody could see where the money was. That absurdity is the starting point for understanding why Nigeria’s anti-corruption strategy of the last decade has been less about chasing thieves and more about closing the rooms where they used ...