A critical examination of the Tinubu administration’s economic record
By Kunle Oshobi
The Tinubu administration has developed a remarkable talent for propaganda in the face of contradictory evidence. Its spokespeople point to declining inflation, rising foreign reserves, and GDP growth as proof that their reforms are working. Some of those numbers are real. But macroeconomic stabilisation is not the same as economic success, and a stabilisation financed by record borrowing, a punishing interest rate environment, and an ever-widening fiscal deficit is not a reform triumph. It is cosmetic and a postponement of reckoning, with the bill being quietly passed to future generations of Nigerians.
The Deficit: A Record That Speaks for Itself
Nigeria’s 2024 fiscal deficit hit N13.1 trillion, a historic high. The 2025 budget projects another N13.08 trillion shortfall. Between January and November 2024, the federal government borrowed N8.93 trillion from domestic investors alone, exceeding its own borrowing target of N6 trillion by 49 percent. By March 2025, Nigeria’s total public debt had climbed to N149.39 trillion, a 22.8 percent increase in a single year. The 2026 budget, presented in December 2025, projects expenditure of N58.18 trillion against revenue of just N34.33 trillion, a gap of nearly N24 trillion.
The government’s defenders argue that the administration inherited a strained fiscal position. That is partially true. But inheriting a problem does not excuse entrenching and deepening it. Consecutive record deficits, compounded year on year, are not a reform programme. They are a pattern of fiscal indiscipline that places the entire economy at growing risk.
Borrowing the Oxygen the Private Sector Needs to Breathe
The consequences of this borrowing binge are not confined to government balance sheets. When the government floods the domestic money market with high-yield sovereign paper, it competes directly with the private sector for available credit, and wins every time, because government debt carries no default risk. The result is a well-documented economic phenomenon: crowding out.
Under pressure from both high inflation and the government’s financing appetite, the Central Bank of Nigeria raised the Monetary Policy Rate from 18.5 percent when Tinubu took office to a peak of 27.5 percent, now among the highest benchmark rates in the world. Nigerian businesses that need to borrow face lending rates of 35 to 40 percent. As the Director-General of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria has stated, manufacturers need credit at no more than five percent for it to be supportive of production. At 35 percent, credit is not productive capital, it is a punitive burden that only the most desperate or most profitable businesses will accept.
The data confirms the damage. Private sector credit, which peaked at N78.1 trillion in April 2025, fell for four consecutive months to N75.83 trillion by August. Academic research published in the African Journal of Economic Review found that a one-unit increase in public debt produces a 1.49-unit decrease in private sector credit in Nigeria, a statistically significant crowding-out effect in both the short and long run. The productive sector, the only engine that can sustainably grow the economy, create jobs, and generate the tax revenues that reduce the need for borrowing, is being systematically starved of the capital it requires.
139 Million in Poverty: The Number Behind the Headlines
The administration’s macroeconomic improvements, modest GDP growth of around 3.1 to 3.5 percent, declining headline inflation, and rising reserves, are not fabrications. But the World Bank’s October 2025 Nigeria Development Update delivered a verdict that no government press release can undo: an estimated 139 million Nigerians now live in poverty. That is up from 87 million in 2023, when the reforms began. In two years of reform, the number of poor Nigerians grew by 52 million people. The poverty rate stands at approximately 61 percent, nearly double the Sub-Saharan African average of 36.5 percent. Even the IMF acknowledged in April 2025 that the gains of Tinubu’s reforms have “yet to benefit all Nigerians as poverty and food insecurity remain high.”
This is the human reality that macroeconomic aggregates obscure. GDP growth is a statistical average; it tells you nothing about distribution. An economy can grow while the majority of its citizens get poorer if the gains are concentrated at the top. Without deliberate transmission mechanisms, affordable credit for small businesses, investment in food supply chains, and functioning social safety nets, macroeconomic gains remain abstractions that most Nigerians will never feel.
The Fundamental Contradiction at the Heart of This Administration
There is an irresolvable tension in the Tinubu administration’s economic posture. The Central Bank runs the tightest monetary policy in Nigeria’s recent history, raising rates to fight inflation and stabilise the naira. Simultaneously, the fiscal authority runs an aggressively expansionary spending policy, widening deficits and borrowing at record levels. These two positions directly undermine each other. Expansionary fiscal policy generates inflation, which forces the CBN to raise rates further. Higher rates choke private sector credit. Reduced private investment slows growth and job creation. Slower growth yields less tax revenue, widening the deficit and requiring yet more borrowing. Nigeria is caught in this doom loop, and the administration’s spending conduct is what keeps it there.
Breaking this cycle requires genuine fiscal consolidation: prioritising capital over recurrent expenditure, reducing the cost of governance, directing oil revenue savings into productive infrastructure rather than a fiscal void, and building the domestic revenue base rather than substituting borrowing for it. These are not complicated ideas. They are the basic requirements of sound economic management. The question is whether a government that has consistently expanded spending, repeatedly breached its own borrowing targets, and failed to publish statutory budget implementation reports is genuinely committed to them.
Conclusion: Patience Has Limits, and So Does Borrowed Time
The Tinubu administration’s consistent message to Nigerians is one of patience: the painful sacrifices of today will yield the rewards of tomorrow. That framing might be credible if the evidence showed a government building something sustainable. Instead, the evidence shows a government borrowing heavily, spending on recurrent costs rather than productive investment, pricing the private sector out of the credit market, and presiding over a near-doubling of the poverty headcount, all while announcing, each year, an even larger and more deficit-laden budget than the last.
You cannot fix an economy with fiscal indiscipline. You can stabilise certain indicators while the underlying conditions that produce poverty, unemployment, and low investment remain firmly in place. That is precisely what is happening in Nigeria today. The reforms that matter, the ones that would lower the cost of credit for a Lagos manufacturer, reduce the price of food for a family in Kano, or create a job for a graduate in Port Harcourt, have not yet arrived. Until fiscal discipline becomes practice rather than rhetoric, they will not.
Kunle Oshobi is a development economist and the Head of Planning and Strategy of the Narrative Force
