By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Every dying court keeps a jester. His trade is not truth. His trade is to fill the throne room with laughter and rounded figures so the king never hears the crowd starving at the gate.
On 2 August 2026, Bayo Onanuga, Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu, took the stage again. He called his act “Facts, Not Fear.” A bold billing for a man selling neither. He handed Nigerians fiction painted as fact, and cowardice painted as confidence, and asked them to applaud.
We will not applaud. We will audit. Point by point. Figure by figure. Source by source. And we will call the act by its name.
HE MOVED THE GOALPOST, THEN SCORED
His miracle comes first. The economy, he swears, crashed to about 253 billion dollars, then vaulted to roughly 377 billion, a leap of 49 per cent. In naira, 314 trillion to 530 trillion.
He forgot to mention who moved the ruler.
In mid 2025 the National Bureau of Statistics rebased the economy, shifting the base year from 2010 to 2019. In a single afternoon, with no factory built and no farm cleared and no hand put to work, nominal GDP jumped about 34.4 per cent. A clerk changed a figure. That is his “recovery.” SBM Intelligence named it with a straight face: rebasing the illusion.
The rest of his 49 per cent is a corpse and a shadow, inflation and a butchered currency counted twice. When prices rise 15 to 16 per cent a year and the naira is filleted to a third of its worth, the naira tag on everything swells. That is not wealth. That is a fever chart, and the jester is reading the fever as good health.
The number he strangled in the wings is real growth: 3.89 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, by his own bureau. Against a population growing about 2.5 per cent a year, the ordinary Nigerian is left with crumbs. Income per head crawls near 1,556 dollars, among the poorest on the planet.
Move the base year and the graph climbs. The empty pot on the fire does not.
SEVEN MILLION NIGERIANS DROWNED IN ONE YEAR
Here is the figure his hands are too small to hide.
The World Bank, in its Nigeria Development Update of April 2026, records poverty rising from 56 per cent in 2023, to 61 per cent in 2024, to 63 per cent in 2025. About 140 million citizens. And roughly seven million Nigerians were pushed under the poverty line in 2025 alone.
Lay that beside his boast. He crows about 49 per cent growth. In that very stretch, seven million of our people fell into hunger. The Bank does not blink at the contradiction. It states it flatly: poverty climbed even as inflation eased.
And the deeper wound. The Bank’s Country Partnership Framework for 2026 to 2032 finds about 79 per cent of Nigerians, some 198 million people, poor or one shock away from it. Four in five. Not under a past regime. Under his king. This year.
You cannot rebase an empty stomach. Its base year is always today.
THE HUNGER HE DARES CALL STABILITY
The jester pledges inflation will “trend towards 12 per cent” by year end. He is the last soul in the market who believes his own line.
The NBS puts headline inflation at 15.91 per cent in June 2026. Food inflation, the only figure a mother counts, sat at 17.52 per cent and had climbed for a fifth straight month. His own Central Bank does not trust him. It has nailed interest rates at 26.5 per cent to fight the very blaze he swears is out.
Even Standard Chartered, no friend of ours, now sees inflation averaging 15.5 per cent across 2026 and has binned its old 12 per cent guess. For the poorest homes, spending up to 70 per cent of everything on food, his “stability” is a knife at the throat, drawn a little deeper at every market stall.
THE DEBT HE SWEARS IS MODEST
Here the clown grows dangerous.
Debt, he purrs, is a mere 40 per cent of GDP, and every kobo was borrowed “according to the law.”
The Debt Management Office puts total public debt at 159.28 trillion naira as at December 2025, up from 33.13 trillion in 2021. A climb of about 380 per cent in four years. By July 2026 the DMO shaved the headline to 129.9 trillion, pleading that most of the surge was naira revaluation and the securitisation of old Central Bank advances, not fresh money.
Weigh that alibi. Their defence of the debt mountain is that the currency collapsed so brutally it inflated the ledger. That is not an acquittal. It is a signed confession.
Then his pet ratio. Debt service, he claims, is “less than 60 per cent” of revenue. The books call him a liar. BudgIT and independent reviews of the 2025 accounts put it between 67 and 84 per cent of federally retained revenue for stretches of the year. Two, three, sometimes four naira of every four the government scraped together went to lenders before one child sat in one classroom.
And “according to the law”? The 2026 budget runs a deficit near 31.45 trillion naira, 6.4 per cent of GDP. The Fiscal Responsibility Act sets the ceiling at 3 per cent. His king has more than doubled the legal limit. The law he waves in our faces is the law he tramples.
WHERE THE SUBSIDY SAVINGS WENT: ASK HIS OWN MINISTER
The jester asks, chin up, “Where did the subsidy savings go?”, then answers himself with the fat allocations now dropped on the states.
He needed only to shout across the corridor to the Minister of Finance.
On 30 July 2026, Taiwo Oyedele told the Africa Emerging Markets Forum, reported by Reuters, that the savings from scrapping the fuel and foreign exchange subsidies had been largely swallowed by higher debt servicing and swollen spending. Say it plainly. The trillions torn from the mouths of the poor were fed straight back to the debt this jester calls modest.
Three years on, the government has not published one audited naira of those savings. The minister could offer only a breakdown “in a few days.” Labour called the whole routine a public relations gimmick. And this, this government that cannot account for its own plunder, has the gall to demand that Atiku Abubakar “show his workings.”
The plump allocations, 2.036 trillion naira in March 2026 against 629 billion in March 2023, are the same slaughtered naira weighed by the sackful. More paper, worthless paper. And the national minimum wage of 70,000 naira now buys about 47 dollars a month, with even the 40 per cent allowance still unpaid.
The subsidy savings raised no nation. By the minister’s own mouth, they were thrown into the furnace of the debt.
THE LOAN HE DARES CALL EDUCATION
He struts out NELFUND as a trophy. Be precise. NELFUND is a loan. It is debt torn off a bankrupt treasury and strapped to the backs of teenagers. It exists only because this government’s inflation and currency collapse smashed the ability of ordinary families to pay fees they once met with ease. You do not heal a man by charging him rent on the crutch you sold him.
His tax “reforms” land in a country where 63 per cent are poor and the informal economy is the last hiding place of the jobless. Analysts already warn of new levies loading, because the debt is hungry and must be fed. That is not progressive taxation. That is a net flung wider over drowning men.
WHAT OBASANJO AND ATIKU LEFT ON THE TABLE
The jester could not swallow his spite for “the Obasanjo Atiku years, 1999 to 2007.” Very well. Open the ledger.
In that era Nigeria’s GDP rose from about 58 billion dollars in 1999 to some 270 billion by 2007. Better still, that government won the Paris Club exit, roughly 18 billion dollars of debt forgiven and tens of billions cleared, until Nigeria’s external debt fell to around 3.5 billion dollars by 2006. They walked out having handed the nation over almost free of foreign debt, reserves rising.
His king inherited that harvest and its fruits, and has since dragged the country to 159 trillion naira in debt and 140 million citizens in the dust. The men he mocks left a full treasury. The man he serves is scraping the bottom of an empty one.
FORWARD, HE CRIES. FORWARD INTO THE PIT
He signs off with a wave, “Forward Ever,” and brands every critic a “political carpetbagger.” The oldest reflex in a failing court. When you have no answer for the hunger, spit on the hungry.
The figures will not clap for him. Seven million new poor in a year. Food prices climbing into a sixth month. Two in every three naira of revenue surrendered to lenders. A deficit at twice the legal wall. Subsidy savings burned on debt by the finance minister’s own tongue. This is no reform bearing fruit. It is a reform stacking corpses.
Bayo Onanuga called his piece “Facts, Not Fear.” He gave Nigerians neither the facts nor the spine to face them. He gave them the arithmetic of a jester, sums that fatten the throne and famish the country.
Nigerians have already done the true sum, in the dark, on empty stomachs. They will read the answer aloud on 16 January 2027. That answer is Atiku Abubakar. That answer is the African Democratic Congress. And no amount of palace laughter will drown it out.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
2 August 2026
