By Tanimu Yakubu

A striking feature of Nigeria’s current economic debate is the enthusiasm with which huge numbers are circulated—and the casualness with which they are assembled. Tax collections are added to oil receipts; oil receipts are added again under customs or “subsidy savings”; borrowing is treated as income; and the resulting total is presented as proof of incompetence or theft.

This is not an economic analysis. It is an arithmetic illusion.

At the core of most viral critiques of Tinubunomics lies a fundamental failure to distinguish between revenue, cash, and financing, and between federation-wide collections and federal budgetary resources. These are not technicalities. They are the foundation of public finance.

Revenue is not the same as cash available to the Federal Government. Borrowing is not income; it is financing and creates future obligations. Federation receipts are not equivalent to what the Federal Government can spend.

Once these distinctions are ignored, any number—no matter how dramatic—can be manufactured.

The familiar pattern runs as follows. Aggregate tax collections are cited, often correctly, in gross terms. Oil revenues are then added without clarifying whether they are gross or net, federation-wide or federally retained, or whether costs, deductions, and under-recoveries have been netted off. Customs receipts are layered on, sometimes without stating whether they are already embedded in non-oil revenue totals. Borrowing is then added as though it were free money. Finally, “subsidy savings” are thrown into the mix, as if stopping a fiscal leak produces a vault of idle cash.

The result is a large headline number—₦150 trillion, ₦170 trillion, ₦180 trillion—followed by the question: where did the money go?

The answer is straightforward: much of it never existed in the form being implied.

Subsidy reform, for instance, does not conjure discretionary cash. It closes a hole. Under the old regime, underpricing manifested through arrears, opaque netting, and quasi-fiscal obligations. Reform first eliminates these hidden drains. The fiscal benefit appears gradually—through reduced deficit pressure, better budgeting discipline, and explicit, targeted support—not through a sudden pile of spendable “savings.”

Debt figures are similarly abused. A significant portion of Nigeria’s recent increase in debt stock in naira terms reflects exchange-rate revaluation of existing external obligations, not fresh borrowing. When the exchange rate adjusts, the naira value of dollar-denominated debt rises automatically. Treating this accounting effect as new borrowing is a category error, not a discovery.

Most persistently, federation-wide collections are presented as if they belong solely to the Federal Government. They do not. Revenues in a federation are shared, earmarked, netted, and statutorily allocated. Federal budget reality is determined by FGN retained revenue plus deficit financing, not by gross federation inflows aggregated for political effect.

Tinubunomics was never a promise of instant abundance. It is a macro-fiscal reset undertaken within hard constraints: inherited debt service, FX realism, security spending, legacy arrears, and competing constitutional obligations. Its logic is structural—restoring price signals, strengthening revenue administration, rebuilding credibility, and re-pricing the public balance sheet while protecting the most vulnerable.

Those who insist on treating national finance as a household ledger will always find scandal where none exists. But accountability does not begin with social media addiction. It starts with audit logic.

The proper way to interrogate government performance is simple: examine federal retained revenue; separate it clearly from financing; track expenditure across debt service, personnel, capital, and transfers; and then assess outputs—roads built, power delivered, rail extended, schools and clinics rehabilitated.

Anything else is not subject to scrutiny. It is a theatre.

And no amount of theatrical arithmetic can substitute for fiscal discipline.


– Yakubu is the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation.

By Temitope Ajayi

Public debate on government finances in Nigeria is once again clouded by confusion, little knowledge, and deliberate misrepresentation. At the centre of the current controversy is a misunderstanding of the distinction between total revenue generated by government agencies and the portion that actually belongs to the federal government.

The confusion has been amplified by commentators who should know better and by a media ecosystem increasingly driven by noise rather than nuance. As a result, statements by President Bola Tinubu on revenue performance and remarks by the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr Wale Edun, have been wrongly framed as contradictory, when in fact they address two entirely different fiscal realities.

There is a deliberate effort by some individuals to muddy the waters by feeding the public with misleading information. One wonders why anyone would take pleasure in unleashing such information warfare on the public.

Regrettably, it appears the mainstream media, which should help frame rational and meaningful public discourse, increasingly relies on social media for stories. They appear more interested in amplifying popular sentiments, even when wrong or absurd, for clicks and views rather than clarity. The situation is even worse on television and radio, where self-styled experts are given ample airtime to spread ignorance. These individuals parade themselves as public affairs analysts, often lacking the requisite expertise.

Last September, President Tinubu said the federal government had achieved its non-oil revenue target for 2025 by August. He made this statement during a meeting with members of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and The Buhari Organisation (TBO), led by former governor of Nasarawa State, Senator Tanko Al-Makura.

By August, the Nigeria Revenue Service had collected over ₦22 trillion in taxes, while the Nigeria Customs Service had generated over ₦5 trillion. The NNPC also reported several trillions of naira in remittances to the government. These figures did not even include receipts from other revenue-generating agencies such as the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), and others.

However, during a public hearing at the National Assembly late last year, Edun said the Federal Government could not fund its capital budget adequately because it did not have enough money. Some analysts and opposition figures, due to their poor understanding of the minister’s statement, seized on it as a talking point to misinform Nigerians. In reality, President Tinubu was correct, and Minister Edun did not contradict him.

Here are the facts:

President Tinubu was right to say revenue targets were met, as revenue-generating agencies exceeded their 2025 targets. Meeting revenue targets does not mean a government has all the money it needs. No government in the world, including the wealthiest nations, has all the money it needs. This is why most governments run deficits. A deficit is the gap between revenue and expenditure, which is usually financed through borrowing and other non-revenue sources. Nigeria’s situation is like that of a man who needs ₦10 million annually to meet his personal and family obligations but earns ₦3 million. If he sets a target to increase his income to ₦6 million and succeeds, he has met his target but still falls short of his needs.

All revenues generated by agencies such as the Nigeria Revenue Service, NNPC, NIMASA, NPA, Customs, NCC, NMDPRA, and NUPRC are paid into the Federation Account. The money in the Federation Account does not belong solely to the Federal Government. It is a pool from which the federal government, state, and local governments receive their statutory allocations.

When Mr. Edun spoke about ₦10 trillion as Federal Government revenue in 2025, he was referring to the Federal Government’s share from the Federation Account— the actual money available for federal spending.

The money being spent by the 36 states, the FCT, and the 774 local governments is primarily derived from the Federation Account through monthly FAAC allocations, as stipulated by the 1999 Constitution (as amended). Apart from Lagos State, Rivers State, the Federal Capital Territory and possibly two other states, over 90 per cent of the revenue of 32 states and the 774 local governments comes from their share of the Federation Account. The internally generated revenue of many states and local governments, as reflected in their 2026 budget proposals, is less than 10 percent of their planned expenditure for the year. It, therefore, the federally collected revenues into the federation account that the entire machinery of the three levels of government essentially run on. It is very important that this distinction is made for a better public understanding of how our government is funded.

While it is the job of the opposition and civil society to criticise and hold the government accountable, the media must act as the buffer and guardrails in promoting honest and open public conversations. The media as the watchdog and moral compass of the society should frame national debate in a way that the public is properly educated and enlightened. A well-informed citizenry is essential to sustaining democracy and promoting good governance. Democracy is endangered when charlatans are given unhindered access to microphones to ventilate falsehoods and misrepresent facts.


-Ajayi is Senior Special Assistant to President Tinubu on Media and Publicity

By Festus Adedayo

Time and seasons have their indicators. My people have many of such indicators. For instance, when elders gather to feast on the intestines, the entrails of an Òkété, known as the African giant pouched rat, that community is at its autumn. In Christendom, the fig tree and its leaf are denotatively used to represent the end time. In eschatology, that part of theology concerned with death, judgment and the final destiny of the soul and mankind, Jesus Christ’s parable of the end time told to His disciples is usually referenced. It is their own indicator of elders gathering to eat the entrails of Òkété. Using the branch of the fig tree and its fruits, which my people call ‘èso òpòtó’ as illustration, Christ said that when the fig tree becomes tender, falls ‘and puts forth its leaves’, then you know that human existence, the end, “is nigh”. Except for those imbued with inner eyes, end time is seldom seen.

Those who know signs of end time, when they behold a ripening banana, are alarmed. These ones put a line of Irish poet, Oscar Wilde, to shame. In his The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde had said that those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. I disagree. Those who see end time when things posture to be bright and beautiful, are actually charming without being corrupt. What do you see when you behold a ripening banana? It will show where you belong. Do you see engaging beauty or decomposing beauty? For the ones who are blinded from the truth, what they see in a ripening banana is a transition into a beautiful, fair-complexioned beauty of a hitherto green lump of fruit. Elders who can see autumn ahead see otherwise, prompting them to say, in Yoruba, “ògèdè ńbàjé e l’ó ńpón.” It translates to mean that while we should be sad that the banana fruit is gradually entering its rottening process, some people are glad that it has ripened into an edible piece of fruit.

Men and women we thought were wisemen, by the virtue of the position they hold, gathered to eat entrails of the Òkété in the Nigerian senate last week. Venue was the Red Chamber of the National Assembly. For those of us who do not queue behind Wilde, when recently, the Nigerian president belatedly released the names of his nominees for ambassadorial positions, we didn’t see wisdom, we saw the fatal hinges of politics making grating noise.

But we were in for further rude shocks of human beings who got carnal in their pleasures. For once, we began to agree with another of Wilde’s submissions that behind everything exquisite, beautiful and charming things, there exists something tragic. The president’s ambassadorial appointment list appeared charming but it was tragic. It immediately reminded me of how we inverted a line of the Christian hymnal, “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things bright and wonderful, the Lord God made them all”.

The hymn was from the famous opening of a beloved Christian hymnal written by Cecil Frances Alexander, in 1848. Alexander used the hymn to celebrate God’s marvelous creation, divine aesthetic artistry and order. These range from tiny flowers and birds, to majestic mountains, the binary of the rich and poor, and natural creations like sun and wind. Odolaye Aremu, the late Ilorin bard, also broke this God’s artistry down into some tiny granules in his poetic rendition when he lauded God as one who created the rain, famine, winter and hot weather. He did this as he sang, “as’òjò, as’òdá, asè’kàn bí orururu, asè’kàn a dàbíi oyé…”

Pardon my insolent digression. I will digress again presently. So, I have taken liberty to inflect Alexander’s hymnal to read, in present day reality of Nigeria, “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, Bola Tinubu made them worse.” The ambassadorial list was an example. It consists of many of the very worst of Nigerians. But, do we know that this Nigeria that has become almost a mess of pottage in the hands of Tinubu used to be a great country?

A famous Learned Silk put a call to me last week. He took me on a fascinating but difficult-to-believe journey of Nigeria’s past greatness. Did I know how great Nigeria used to be? He enumerated them all. From Nigeria’s Anglo-Defence pact, the nationalization of the British Petroleum and other foreign companies and corporations in Nigeria under the Indigenization Decree. Under such greatness that Nigeria was enveloped, a Donald Trump would not dare talk down on Nigeria as he did recently. He dared not dare. Nigeria would square up to him. Great Pat Utomi, on a television programme last week, spoke brilliantly on how Nigeria has become strategically irrelevant in Nigeria and the world. I paraphrase him: If any country of the world wanted to take any decision against any country in Africa, Nigeria was so consequential, was such an octopus, that they would pause to think what Nigeria would feel of such action. Today, Nigeria is rated less than a tissue paper in the eyes of even countries of Africa due to its strategic irrelevance.

Last week, Captain Ibrahim Traore of tiny landlocked Burkina Faso sent Nigeria an ‘àrokò’ of our irrelevance in Africa and even the world. In his estimation, Nigeria is all brown but brawns. In those days when there was no modern means of communication, our forefathers used àrokò, semiotic objects, to communicate.

When my people are thoroughly ashamed about a thing, or unable to fathom a turn of things for the worse, they would simply say, “ojú gbà mí tì fún e’. Literally, it reads, I am unspeakably ashamed of and for you. Last week, I was unspeakably ashamed for the figurine figure Almighty Nigeria had become today when Yusuff Tugar, Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, at a press conference with his Benin counterpart, admitted that eleven Nigerian soldiers and Air Force jet are still under the audacious military jackboots of the Burkinabe junta head. How lower can an Òmìnrán – a giant – sink? In seizing Nigeria’s jet and detaining eleven of its soldiers, Burkina Faso’s àrokò was clear and unambiguous. Nigeria is in the hands of a man whose life is all about politics of election and conquest of opposition figures and parties by stealth but zero in strategic military prowess.

To buttress Utomi and to counterpoise the little jelly power we have become, let me tell you the story of the Olusegun Obasanjo who some regime fawners and data-boy cretins of history take turns to disparage today. In July 2003, an insolent military junta had the temerity to seize power in São Tomé and Príncipe. The democratically elected president, Fradique de Menezes, was yet in Nigeria to attend an economic summit while the cretins, parodying Adewale Ademoyega, struck. Obasanjo didn’t bother to know why they struck. Not only did he condemn the coup, Obasanjo put a call to the leader of the coup plotters and gave them an ultimatum to surrender and hand power back to de Menezes. The plotters complied immediately, eventually signing an agreement to reinstate President Menezes. It was a proud Nigeria which beheld Obasanjo personally accompanying Menezes back to São Tomé and Príncipe.

Where are my manners! I have digressed incredibly, but I am back. When a man has phallic greed and parades a confetti of harem, my people say under his roof are the mentally deranged, the schizophrenic, the mad, witches, the malevolent, the benevolent and all sorts. That description fits President Tinubu’s ambassadorial list. All things bright and beautiful, Tinubu made them ugly. The list Tinubu sent to the parliament is that ugliness. To truly appreciate what befell Nigeria in that ambassadorial list, try and internalize a Yoruba proverb which says that when a calamity of monstrous dimension befalls a man, lesser indignities begin to clamber him. A list that contains Reno Omokri, Mahmood Yakubu, ex-electoral umpire and some other floating leaves without character shares synonym with the man I referenced above whose harem is populated by a rainbow of afflictions. It is a combination of asymmetric persons, what Yoruba will call an admixture of ‘lúrú’ and ‘sàpà’ as soup ingredients, the result of which is a culinary disaster.

When the list got to the senate, it mutated from a monstrous calamity into frightening indignities that clambered our country. Not that Nigerians expected anything different from the senators. As if Odolaye Aremu read that Wilde’s classic, in an elegy he did for the assassinated Premier of Nigeria’s Western Region, S. L. Akintola, Odolaye sang that when a matter is more grisly in stature than what can be countenanced, so much that even a bitter cry cannot capture the pain felt, we must burst into laughter. “Òrò t’ó bá ju ekún lo, èrín l’a fií rín,” he sang. To demonstrate this, Odolaye burst into laughter himself. Can’t we see, Odolaye asked, how dried lumps of yam called ìpáńkóró, while pounding them with pestle and mortar, have turned this routine kitchen exercise into an onomatopoeia, as the duo make the strange sound of “gba-han-ran, gba-han-ran”?

To be fair to Godswill Akpabio, his tenth senate did not pioneer the groveling groove that the Nigerian parliament, which we euphemistically call the senate, has become today. Nigeria’s National Asssembly has always been a throb in the people’s veins. In its poetry of self, our parliament is the most unpoetic of all. Yet, we expected some redemptive move from it which, like a flash in the pan, we sometimes get. Take for instance a couple of weeks ago. Nominee for the Minister of Defence portfolio, Christopher Musa, stood before the senate. A Niger State senator, consumed by the obsequious culture which Nigeria’s parliament wears as a lapel, had asked Musa to take a bow. As they say that it is a violent pedigree that will make a man seek a bullet-evading charm called Òkígbé, and that it is only he who is gifted with the metaphysical ability to see the unseen who is afraid all the time, Akpabio was livid. He must be aware that the pot of soup which all of them made ring round, tossing its pound of roasted meats inside their rapacious oesophagus at will, was under serious threat by the rascally Donald Trump. For the very first time, Akpabio was recorded to be on his feet. Venom danced round his lips like a threatened viper. How dare you! He seemed to be telling Musa, the senator. Trump is on our neck and you are asking a nominee for defence portfolio to bow and go!

But not to worry. The vulture seemed to have been sufficiently chased away from the huge gourmet meal that is Nigeria. The senate’s personal meal not looking threatened, it was time for the parliamentarians to return to their vomit. And, man, did the senators gobble this mountainous vomit! At the screening of Tinubu’s 65 career and non-career ambassadorial nominees last week, we expected the men we purportedly elected to humour us. To at least make a pretence to nationhood, that the love of Nigeria was their most prized possession. No, it was not time for base humour. So it was that, from start to finish, it was as if a huge billowing wind gushed from nowhere and exposed the rump of their hen. We saw their narcissim in its nakedness. I pray I don’t kill Oscar Wilde a second time in this piece. In his The decay of Lying, Wilde said while one recognises the poet by his fine lines, a liar can be recognised by his rich rhythmic utterance. Immediately ex-Governor Adams Oshiomhole stood up to speak, Wilde’s was what I saw. I searched Oshiomhole’s mouth meticulously. I couldn’t find a single dot of blood. You can find everything but a sprinkle of lie in the mouth of a liar, so say my people.

Senators know Nigerians love theatre, so at that screening point, they gave our people more than their fill. Between Oshiomhole and Ali Ndume, Nigerians had a mouthful. It was at the point of screening of itinerant Janus, Reno Omokri. Oshiomhole, regarded more for the lyricism in his utterances than the senses therein, first began the outburst. He said he wanted to speak on Omokri “in the public interest”. Then he threw the whole issue to the dogs and the dogs, unable to fathom it, threw it to the swines, and the swines, seeing how filthy and smelly it was, threw it into the sewage. “When I talk, those who have not been governors should listen.” Then Ndume, visibly irritated by such cant, hit back, “You have never dreamed of being a senator when I became one.” I had never seen immodesty advertized as public character as this.

Then the former governor espoused the theory of pragmatism as justification for Omokri’s reversibility. The brainchild of key figures like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, pragmatism is a philosophy which has its roots in 19th century USA. Its thrust is that the meaning, truth and value of ideas can be found in their practical consequences. I would like to look Oshiomhole in the face and ask him how he could have taken self-service to this absurdly shameless height that he did the memory of a pragmatist like John Dewey such a violent injustice. It was so bad that his bones turned in throbbing pain. Comparing his pragmatist school with the oesophagus pursuits of Omokri was verbal diarrhoea.

The day our legislature started the “bow and go” syndrome, Nigerian parliament began to atrophy. This perfunctory parliamentary approval process has highlighted severe institutional and procedural weaknesses which are now dominant in Nigeria’s legislative and democratic practice. Nigeria’s screening is so bland that it sickens. There have been allegations that huge money is tethered by the feet of the parliament’s mace before screening.

Yet screening of nominees is at the core of legislative duties. It increases openness and accountability and nourishes democracy. Inappropriate political patronage and kow-towing, the like we saw last Thursday, undermine us. How do Nigerians have a window into the minds of their ambassadors? Why not build scenario questions of contemporary bilateral situations for the nominees to answer, so that we could have a peep into their acuity? Screening also allows nominees to wittingly or unwittingly reveal certain information about themselves. For instance, in 1999, while being grilled by the South African Judicial Commission at the Constitutional Court, Justice Edwin Cameron, a respected judge who was a gay member of the South African high court, self-confessed. The grilling buoyed the commission’s reputation for making non-discriminatory appointments. In the Nigerian senate last week, most of the nominees were simply asked to take a bow and go after introducing themselves. The whole charade was highly pro-forma, perfunctory, and largely a ceremonial pumping of hands.

Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele’s defence of the cancerous Bow and Go syndrome continued on the trajectory of sophistry that the Nigerian parliament is notorious for. While Akpabio, the week before, threw Bow and Go to the wolves to maul, Opeyemi resurrected it from the jaws of the carnivores and polished it for public amusement. Bamidele said the tradition is reserved for “individuals with established and verifiable records of public service.” Which is absolute bunkum. Why would the senate of Nigeria not be interested in asking Omokri questions, especially as regards Mike Arnold, an American former Mayor’s allegation against him of being a “pathological liar”?

In a letter addressed to the parliament, Arnold told the parliament that Reno was a “shape-shifting mercenary” who says whatever he is paid to say, which makes him unfit for a diplomatic role. Not done, he also claimed that Omokri’s nomination “plays into the negative international stereotype of a ‘slick scammer,’ which would de-market Nigeria on the world stage. That is Opeyemi’s “verifiable record of public service”?

What about the optics of reward-for-a-good-job embedded in a president appointing a man who superintended over his election? That appointment was immoral, adulterous and incestuous. It can be likened to a referee in a UEFA championship being engaged the following season by the winning team as coach. If the appointor was shameless to offer, the appointee must be man enough to say no. To ask Yakubu directly, when is enough really enough for him? This was a man who was executive secretary of TETFUND since 2007, assistant secretary of finance and administration at the 2014 National Conference and who spent ten years as INEC chairman. Must the straw in the feeding bottle of Nigeria be eternally in Mamood Yakubu’s mouth?

We will be dignifying the word ‘circus’ if we say what we saw in the senate last Thursday was one. What we had was people we thought were wisemen gathering to feast on the worthless intestines of an Òkété. An elderly man who eats the intestines of an Òkété is disreputable. Eating it indicates that summertime “is nigh” and it is time to close shop.