Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Mr Tanimu Yakubu, says President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms, widely referred to as Tinubunomics, were never designed or presented as a guarantee of instant abundance.
Yakubu, in a statement on Sunday, said critics were drawing the wrong conclusions about the expected pace and nature of the reforms, stressing that they represented a macro-fiscal reset undertaken within hard constraints.
These constraints, he noted, included inherited debt-service burdens, foreign-exchange realism, security spending, legacy arrears, and competing constitutional obligations.
According to him, the logic of the reforms was structural – aimed at restoring price signals, strengthening revenue administration, rebuilding credibility, and re-pricing the public balance sheet, while safeguarding the most vulnerable.
“Those who insist on treating national finance as a household ledger will always find scandal where none exists,” he said. “But accountability does not begin with social-media addiction. It starts with audit logic.”
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Yakubu advised that the proper way to interrogate government performance is to examine federal retained revenue separately from financing; track expenditure across debt service, personnel, capital, and transfers; and then assess the outputs in terms of roads built, power delivered, rail extended, and schools and clinics rehabilitated.
“Anything else is not subject to scrutiny. It is a theatre,” he noted, insisting that “no amount of theatrical arithmetic can substitute for fiscal discipline.”
Yakubu also faulted what he described as the “enthusiasm with which huge numbers are circulated — and the casualness with which they are assembled” in current public debates about the economy.
He said critics often lumped together tax collections, oil receipts, customs duties, borrowing, and so-called subsidy savings, then present the inflated totals as proof of incompetence or corruption.
“This is not economic analysis. It is an arithmetic illusion,” he said, adding that many viral critiques failed to distinguish between revenue, cash, and financing, or between federation-wide collections and federal budget resources.
“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.”
Yakubu explained that subsidy reform should also not be misconstrued as creating a pool of spare cash.
“Subsidy reform does not conjure discretionary cash. It closes a hole,” he said, noting that previous under-pricing created arrears, opaque netting, and quasi-fiscal obligations that first needed to be eliminated before benefits could materialise through lower deficits and better budgeting discipline.
He further clarified that a significant portion of the recent rise in Nigeria’s debt stock reflected the revaluation of existing external debt due to exchange-rate adjustment — not fresh borrowing.
“Treating this accounting effect as new borrowing is a category error, not a discovery,” he stated.
Yakubu concluded by stressing that federation-wide revenues do not belong solely to the Federal Government.
“Federal budget reality is determined by FGN retained revenue plus deficit financing — not by gross federation inflows aggregated for political effect,” he said.
Yakubu’s error
According to Mr Yakubu, a significant portion of the recent rise in Nigeria’s debt stock reflected the revaluation of existing external debt due to exchange-rate adjustment — not fresh borrowing.
However, Mr Yakubu is completely wrong. As of the time former President Muhammadu Buhari left office on May 29, 2023, the nation’s total public debt stood at N87.379 trillion, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO)’s June 2023 data. However, with President Tinubu coming to power that same day, Nigeria’s debt profile rose thereafter, hitting N152.398 trillion as of June 2025, the DMO data reveal.
This means that President Tinubu’s administration racked up N65.019 trillion between June 2023 and June 2025, marking 43 percent of the current public debt stock.
In fact, the Bola Tinubu’s administration borrowed $3.754 billion from the World Bank alone in 2025, signifying the government’s rising growing appetite for foreign loans. This does not consider what his administration borrowed in 2024.
According to Economy Post‘s analysis from the World Bank’s projects for Nigeria, the global lender had 11 big projects for Nigeria last year, covering issues from sustainable agriculture and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to digital infrastructire and nutrition improvement.
Also, the Nigerian government got a $2 billion loan from China’s Export-Import Bank in 2025 for a $2 billion loan for the construction of a new electricity super grid to address Nigeria’s long-standing power supply challenges.
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According to Minister of Power, Mr Adebayo Adelabu, “It’s part of plans to decentralise power generation in Nigeria and get the heavy commercial users that left the power grid because of its unreliability to return.”
In 2025, President Bola Tinubu asked the National Assembly to approve plans to raise $2.35 billion in external loans to part-finance the 2025 budget deficit and refinance Nigeria’s maturing Eurobonds, with another request to issue a $500 million sovereign Sukuk to fund infrastructure.
According to the president, the $2.35 billion borrowing was made up of new external loans of N1.843 trillion (about $1.229 billion at N1,500/$), which would help to finance the 2025 Appropriation Act and $1.118 billion to refinance Eurobonds issued in 2018 – due to mature in November 2025.
Alsi in 2025, Nigeria held a $2.35 billion Eurobonds to raise funds to meet several needs. But it was oversubscribed and attracted a record $13 billion orders mostly from international investors who wanted to participate in the market. Eurobonds are debts and are repaid in dollars.
Hence, President Tinubu is borrowing more in external debt and his debt has exceeded N90 trillion in naira terms in over 30 months.
