By Kunle Oshobi
The Tinubu administration’s conflation of higher nominal revenue with an improved economy is not just a communication failure; it is a governance one.
There is a particular kind of economic illiteracy that is especially dangerous when it occupies high office: the confusion of activity with progress. Since assuming the presidency in May 2023, President Bola Tinubu’s administration has repeatedly pointed to rising revenue figures as evidence that its economic reforms are working. The numbers are real. The conclusion is false.
Here is the inconvenient arithmetic. When this administration took office, the naira exchanged at roughly ₦450 to the dollar. Today, it hovers around ₦1,480. That is a devaluation of almost 250%. When government revenue rises by, say, 80% in naira terms but the currency has lost two-thirds of its purchasing power against the dollar, there has been no real revenue gain. There has been a loss, dressed in larger nominal figures. A Deloitte analysis of the 2025 budget confirmed this plainly: the proposed expenditure, though 42% higher in naira terms than the 2024 budget, was actually lower in real dollar terms, from $43.9 billion to $33.2 billion. This is not an improvement. It is inflation wearing a suit.
More troubling is how that revenue was generated. The removal of the fuel subsidy, the unification of the foreign exchange market, and the increase in electricity tariffs were not without economic logic; structural reform is never painless. But the burden of these policies fell almost entirely on ordinary Nigerians. Petrol prices rose by over 200% in the months following subsidy removal. Food inflation surged to a 20-year high of nearly 41% by mid-2024. Under the previous Buhari administration, Nigeria had overtaken India as the poverty capital of the world, with 104 million people living in poverty. As if being the poverty capital of the world was not bad enough, in less than two years, the Bola Tinubu administration increased the number of people living in poverty in Nigeria to 133 million. The additional revenue was extracted from citizens who could least afford it, with almost nothing returned to them in services, infrastructure, or relief.
“Revenue extracted from the poor and swallowed by debt servicing is not reform. It is organised hardship.”
Where, then, did the money go? Largely due to debt. The government’s debt servicing costs rose from ₦8 trillion in 2024 to over ₦16 trillion in the 2025 budget, more than the combined allocations for defence, education, health, and infrastructure. In 2024, the federal government recorded revenue of ₦20.98 trillion against actual expenditure of ₦34.49 trillion, producing a deficit of ₦13.58 trillion. Nearly the entire gap was financed by new borrowing. Nigeria’s public debt stock now exceeds $100 billion.
Meanwhile, capital expenditure, the spending that builds roads, hospitals, schools, and power plants, has been chronically underfunded. The capital component of the 2024 budget performed so poorly that the National Assembly extended its implementation into mid-2025. By June 2025, only ₦3.99 trillion of the 2024 capital budget had been utilised. The 2025 capital budget fared no better: as of Q3 2025, only 17.7% of capital allocations had been released. The government has now extended the 2025 capital budget to November 2026, with 70% of it simply rolled over into the 2026 budget. Two years of capital votes, the spending that might have tangibly improved Nigerian lives, have largely remained on paper.
None of this is to argue that the inherited structural distortions, the fuel subsidy, and the multiple exchange rate windows did not need to be addressed. They did. But reform without protection for the vulnerable is not bold governance; it is recklessness with a reform label. When a government doubles the minimum wage to ₦70,000, and the currency simultaneously collapses to the point where that wage is worth less than $45 a month, below the poverty income threshold, it has not raised wages. It has performed one.
An economy is not measured by what a government collects. It is measured by the welfare of the people, what they can afford to eat, how safely their children can travel to school, whether the lights come on, and whether a generation can look forward with reasonable confidence. By every one of these measures, Nigeria is worse off today than it was in May 2023. Rising FAAC allocations shared among governments are not economic growth. They are, at best, a rearrangement of pain, and at worst, a statistical alibi for failure.
The administration in three years has failed woefully in even attempting to make life better for Nigerians, and the next one year will not be any better as governance will take the back seat while politics takes the front burner as the failed administration schemes to impose themselves on Nigerians for another term of four years.
Kunle Oshobi is the Head of Strategy and Planning of The Narrative Force
