By Moshood Oshunfurewa, a public affairs analyst writes from Lagos.
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How can Nigerian public officials defend the indefensible without being ashamed? It requires a careful blend of statistical obfuscation, semantics of former senator Patrick Obahiagbon linguistic gymnastics, and an unwavering belief that the Nigerian people are either too gullible or too preoccupied with survival to interrogate the numbers being thrown at them. Taiwo Oyedele's recent appearance before the Senate Committee on Finance, where he sought to debunk claims that the Tinubu administration has borrowed ₦80 trillion, is a masterclass in this dark art of the very top of the evil and imperialist parasite. But beneath the veneer of fiscal responsibility lies a government of opaqueness, one that enacts budgets it has no intention of implementing, increases taxes and revenues while poverty deepens, and treats the ordinary Nigerian as nothing more than a beast of burden to be milked dry.
Oyedele's central argument, that the apparent explosion in Nigeria's debt stock from ₦75 trillion to ₦159 trillion is not the result of reckless borrowing but rather a product of "accounting adjustments," naira depreciation, and the securitisation of Ways and Means advances, deserves careful scrutiny. On the surface, his explanation appears technically sound. The naira has depreciated dramatically since the Tinubu administration's ill-conceived currency reforms. External debt denominated in dollars will naturally balloon when converted to naira at a weaker exchange rate. The securitisation of ₦33 trillion in Ways and Means advances from the Central Bank of Nigeria, inherited from the Buhari administration, is indeed an accounting recognition of existing liabilities rather than fresh borrowing. These are facts that cannot be disputed.
But here is where Oyedele's defence unravels. The very act of securitising ₦33 trillion in Ways and Means advances, money that the Buhari administration had illegally borrowed from the CBN beyond the statutory five percent limit, is itself an admission of fiscal recklessness. The National Assembly, in its characteristic abdication of oversight responsibility, rubber-stamped this conversion into formal debt, effectively legitimising a constitutional breach. Oyedele calls this "bringing existing obligations onto the government's books" as though it were an act of transparency. It is not. It is the laundering of fiscal impropriety into the national ledger, and the Nigerian taxpayer is now saddled with servicing debt that was incurred without legislative approval in the first place.
More troubling is Oyedele's dismissive attitude toward the ₦40 trillion added to the debt stock through naira depreciation. He presents this as an act of nature, as though the government bears no responsibility for the catastrophic currency collapse that made it possible. This is the same administration that, in one fell swoop, unified the exchange rate without adequate safeguards, triggering a freefall that saw the naira lose over 70 percent of its value against the dollar. The depreciation was not an external shock imposed upon Nigeria; it was a policy choice made by this government, and its consequences, including the ballooning naira value of external debt, must be laid squarely at its feet. To borrow an analogy from Oyedele's own playbook: if a man sets fire to his house and then complains that the smoke has damaged his neighbour's property, we do not absolve him of responsibility simply because the fire was not intended to harm the neighbour.
But the debt debate, as Oyedele would have it, is a distraction from a far more insidious reality: Nigeria is governed by a system that enacts budgets with great fanfare and then refuses to implement them. Senator Tahir Monguno's intervention during the same Senate session was devastating in its simplicity. "The dividends of democracy are delivered through the implementation of the budget, particularly capital projects. If the budget is not being implemented, then the fundamental purpose of government is undermined." The 2025 budget was not fully implemented, with significant portions of capital expenditure rolled over into 2026. Security agencies reported receiving no capital releases despite the existential threat of insurgency, banditry, and terrorism. This is not governance; it is governance theatre, a performance designed to create the illusion of activity while the machinery of state rusts from disuse.
Consider the implications. Nigeria's 2025 budget was approximately ₦54.99 trillion. If capital expenditure, the portion of the budget that builds roads, schools, hospitals, and power infrastructure, was not implemented, then what exactly did the government spend the money on? The answer is as predictable as it is depressing: recurrent expenditure, debt servicing, and the ever-expanding black hole of "overhead costs" that no Nigerian can audit or trace. The government takes loans, collects taxes, and generates revenue, yet the tangible benefits of these inflows remain invisible to the citizen. It is a system designed not to serve the people but to sustain itself, a leviathan that consumes without producing.
And what of the revenue? Oyedele and his colleagues are quick to trumpet the improved performance of the Federal Inland Revenue Service and the Nigeria Customs Service. Revenue targets have been exceeded, they tell us, as though this is cause for celebration. But let us examine what this means in practice. The government has increased Value Added Tax, introduced new levies, expanded the tax net to capture informal sector workers who can barely feed their families, and raised tariffs on essential imports. The FIRS collected ₦21.5 trillion in 2024, a record high. Yet the minimum wage, after months of protracted negotiations and industrial action, was raised to a paltry ₦70,000, a sum that, in real terms, buys less today than ₦30,000 did five years ago. Inflation hovers around 34 percent. Food prices have doubled and tripled. The naira in the worker's pocket has been decimated. The government takes more and gives less, and then has the audacity to claim fiscal responsibility.
This is the arithmetic of oppression. The government increases its revenue by ₦5 trillion and raises the minimum wage by a fraction of what is needed to restore purchasing power. It borrows trillions and implements none of the capital projects that would justify the debt. It collects taxes from market women and okada riders while politicians and their cronies loot the treasury with impunity. The names have changed, Malami, Gbajabiamila, and their ilk have been replaced by a new crop of beneficiaries, but the script remains the same. Nigeria is a country where public office is a licence to plunder, where accountability is a foreign concept, and where the masses are expected to tighten their belts while the elite loosen theirs.
Senator Mohammed Sani Musa, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, acknowledged that "the ultimate measure of the government's economic reforms would be whether they improve the welfare of Nigerians." He is correct. But let us be clear: by this measure, the Tinubu administration has failed catastrophically. The National Bureau of Statistics may produce charts showing GDP growth and improved macroeconomic indicators, but these are abstractions that mean nothing to the farmer who cannot afford fertiliser, the teacher whose salary cannot cover rent, or the pensioner who dies waiting for gratuity. Economic statistics must translate into better living conditions, or they are merely numbers on a page, comforting to policymakers and insulting to the governed.
The proposal for "performance and priority-based budgeting" is welcome but woefully inadequate. Nigeria does not need new budgeting frameworks; it needs political will. It needs a government that treats the Appropriation Act as binding law rather than a suggestion. It needs transparency in how FAAC allocations are distributed, why ₦1.7 trillion was reportedly retained from the Federation Account, and where the money actually goes. It needs an end to the culture of rollover budgets, where the same phantom projects reappear year after year with increased allocations, enriching contractors and their political patrons while the roads remain unbuilt and the hospitals remain unequipped.
Oyedele's assurance that "every naira and every dollar we borrow must add more value than the amount borrowed" would be laughable if it were not so tragic. The evidence suggests the opposite. Nigeria's debt-to-GDP ratio may still be within what the World Bank considers sustainable, but debt sustainability is not a measure of prosperity. It is a measure of the government's ability to keep servicing its obligations—a low bar for a country that can always squeeze more taxes from its impoverished population or secure another loan from a multilateral institution eager to keep the debtor nation afloat. What matters is not whether Nigeria can pay its debts, but whether those debts have improved the lives of Nigerians. On this count, the verdict is damning.
The truth is that Nigeria is governed by a class of people for whom opacity is not an accident but a strategy. The less the public knows, the less it can demand. The more complex the explanations, the easier it is to deflect accountability. Oyedele's technical defence of the debt numbers is precisely this: a sophisticated distraction from the fundamental question of whether this government serves the people or merely administers their exploitation. A government that enacts budgets and refuses to implement them is not a government; it is a fraud. A government that increases taxes while poverty worsens is not reforming; it is predating. A government that borrows trillions and delivers nothing is not building; it is looting.
Nigeria deserves better than this. The Nigerian people deserve a government that does not treat them as collateral damage in the pursuit of macroeconomic targets devised in air-conditioned offices and defended before committees that lack the courage to hold power to account. They deserve transparency, not technical briefings designed to confuse. They deserve implementation, not appropriation acts that exist only on paper. They deserve a government that understands that the purpose of revenue is not to sustain the state but to serve the citizens.
Until that day comes, Oyedele's numbers, however elegantly presented, will remain what they are: the arithmetic of a government of opaqueness, by opaqueness, and for opaqueness. And the Nigerian people will continue to pay the price.
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