Budget Padding: Senate Press Corps Deploys AI To Track, Expose Unlawful Insertions

By Okechukwu Eze, Abuja

The Senate Press Corps (SPC) has taken the battle against budget padding to a new level with the deployment of Artificial Intelligence tools to track and expose unlawful insertions in the nation’s Appropriation Act.

This was the highpoint of the 2026 Capacity-Building Workshop of the Corps held on Monday at Hearing Room 231, National Assembly Complex, Abuja, with the theme: _”Leveraging Legislative Oversight and Media Collaboration to Safeguard the National Budget from Unlawful Insertions.”_

The workshop, declared open by President of the Senate, Senator Godswill Akpabio, who was represented by the Chairman, Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Senator Yemi Adaramodu, brought together lawmakers, budget experts, civil society leaders and media professionals.

In his speech, Akpabio warned that the National Assembly under his leadership will not tolerate insertions that lack national value.

“The budget is not a bazaar. We are determined to make it clean, transparent and people-oriented. We need the Eagle Eye of the Press Corps to help us achieve that,” he said.

In his remarks, the Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Senator Atiku Bagudu, who delivered the keynote, said President Bola Tinubu’s administration was committed to budget credibility and will open a real-time budget portal for tracking.

In his welcome address, Chairman of the Senate Press Corps, Taiye Odewale, clarified the controversy over the 2026 budget, which rose from N58.47 trillion proposed by President Tinubu to N68.32 trillion passed by the National Assembly – an increase of N9.853 trillion.

Odewale explained that investigations by the Corps showed that the controversial N1.3 billion provision for the non-existent Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) was not part of the N9.853 trillion addition, putting to rest insinuations that the leadership padded the budget with ghost agencies.

Publisher of The Eagle Times Newspaper, Sir Ikechukwu Chukwunyere, in his presentation titled _”Making the Eagle Eye of the Media Sharper at Yearly Budget Scrutinies,”_ unveiled a 5-point template for detecting unlawful insertions: Trace the Origin, Match with Needs Assessment, Geo-tag location, Follow procurement on BPP portal, and Community feedback loop.

“To kill budget padding, ask four questions: Who inserted it? When was it inserted? Who benefits? Does it exist on ground?” Chukwunyere said, drawing a standing ovation.

The technical highpoint came from Texas-based media-tech firm, Mass Media TX Limited, whose intervention changed the tone of the workshop from rhetoric to practical tools.

Led by its expert, Adeola Ademokoya, the firm delivered an intensive hands-on training on “AI for Budget Scrutiny.

Ademokoya demonstrated detailed how AI can convert the 2,800-page Appropriation Act from PDF to searchable Excel in minutes, compare the Executive proposal with the passed version to automatically flag the N9.853 trillion insertions, geo-tag project locations to verify existence, and crawl the BPP and CAC portals to expose shell contractors.

“Manually reading 2,800 pages to find padding is impossible. The budget is now N68.32 trillion. You need AI. Man does the thinking, AI does the searching. With what we have given you today, a reporter can detect a ghost project in 30 seconds,” Ademokoya said.

She disclosed that the firm will grant Senate correspondents six months free access to its Legislative Tracker Dashboard to monitor implementation of the 2026 budget ahead of the 2027 budget presentation.

According to her, “The Eagle Eye of the Press Corps is sharp, but in the age of AI-disorder, it needs binoculars. That is what we have brought.”

Executive Director of CISLAC, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani and Director of BudgIT, Oluseun Onigbinde, in their presentations, revealed that over 7,000 suspicious projects worth N6.1 trillion were inserted into the 2025 budget through collusion between MDAs and lawmakers.

Onigbinde said AI tools like those presented by Mass Media TX will help journalists expose such collusion.

According to an official of the Senate Press Corps, they are considering to set up a Budget Monitoring Desk powered by Mass Media TX tools to track the 2026 budget implementation.