Dr Alex Adum Ter
TINUBUNOMICS is the Chicago State University Licenced SHEMALE accounting principle that uses accounting to obscure the cost of failure and economics to sell that failure to the Republic as reform.
Nigerians must begin asking the question the government desperately wants to avoid:
Where is the money?
Where are the documented gains from fuel-subsidy removal? Where is the transparent reconciliation of what was saved, what was collected, what was transferred to the states, what was spent and what tangible benefits Nigerians received in return?
Instead, we are being served a menu of statistics: GDP is growing, foreign reserves are rising, FAAC allocations are increasing and government revenues are supposedly improving.
Yet the Nigerian is poorer.
Food is unaffordable. Transport is crushing household incomes. Businesses are shutting down. Salaries have lost purchasing power. Millions of Nigerians are working harder merely to remain poor.
If the economy is growing, why is the Nigerian household shrinking?
This is the great deception at the heart of Tinubunomics: confusing fiscal activity with economic prosperity.
More money moving through government accounts does not automatically mean more prosperity in the homes of Nigerians. Bigger FAAC allocations do not constitute economic transformation. Rising foreign reserves do not feed hungry families. GDP statistics do not pay school fees.
And borrowing is certainly not development simply because it increases the size of government expenditure.
Nigeria has watched enormous sums of money appropriated, borrowed and announced while questions persist about procurement transparency, implementation and value for money—including controversies surrounding major projects such as the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway.
A budget is not development. A loan is not development. GDP growth is not development. Foreign reserves are not development.
Development is the Nigerian who can afford food.
It is the graduate who finds a job.
It is the manufacturer who can produce competitively.
It is the farmer who can transport his harvest.
It is the family that can pay school fees.
That is the economy Nigerians live in—not the economy displayed on PowerPoint.
And this is where George Orwell’s Animal Farm provides a chilling metaphor.
The animals were promised liberation. They were told that the farm belonged to them. But eventually, the pigs acquired privileges, rewrote the rules and transformed equality into a system where some animals became considerably more equal than others.
Does this sound unfamiliar?
Nigerians are being asked to sacrifice, endure hardship and tighten their belts while questions continue to be raised about extravagant government expenditure, luxury aircraft, yachts, expensive convoys and the privileges enjoyed by the political elite.
The poor are told to sacrifice while the powerful are protected from the sacrifice.
Governors, constitutionally autonomous political actors within Nigeria’s federal structure, increasingly appear drawn into the federal political banquet through patronage and financial dependence.
The metaphor is unmistakable:
Welcome to the Animal Farm dining table.
There is food.
There is political patronage.
There are FAAC allocations.
There are favours.
There are political rewards.
But there is one condition:
Observe table manners.
Ask no uncomfortable questions.
Challenge no powerful interests.
And never ask who paid for the feast.
But now the kitchen is hot.
🔥
The moment Atiku Abubakar and the African Democratic Congress (ADC) placed transparent accounting, production-based energy reform and genuine economic recovery at the centre of the national conversation, the defenders of the status quo suddenly discovered that the arithmetic was no longer comfortable.
And now we hear that governors should be held responsible for money allegedly transferred to them.
Fine.
Then let Nigerians see the books.
If the money went to the states, account for it.
If it did not go to the states, tell Nigerians where it went.
That is not politics.
That is accountability.
The proposed $1 billion palliative intervention reportedly announced by the First Lady raises another fundamental question: what is the constitutional and appropriation basis for the expenditure, what is its source, who authorised it, who will administer it and who will audit it?
Compassion is commendable.
But public money cannot operate outside constitutional accountability.
Nigeria does not need another spectacular announcement.
Nigeria needs a transparent government.
We need a government that will open the books, expose the leakages, scrutinise every major procurement, explain every borrowing decision and ensure that public expenditure produces measurable public value.
That is why the emergence of Atiku Abubakar and the ADC presents Nigerians with a fundamentally different question.
Not:
Who can give us palliatives?
But:
Who can fix the system that makes palliatives necessary?
Not:
Who can manipulate the statistics?
But:
Who can make the statistics meaningful in the lives of ordinary Nigerians?
Not:
Who can distribute rice at election time?
But:
Who can build an economy where Nigerians do not need political rice to survive?
The 2027 election must therefore not become another bazaar where poverty is weaponised against the poor.
Do not sell your future for a cup of rice.
Do not exchange your children’s future for a few thousand naira on election day.
Do not allow religion to become a shield for incompetence.
Do not allow ethnicity to become a substitute for capacity.
Do not allow geography to become an excuse for mediocrity.
And do not allow commissioned voices to turn the pulpit into a campaign platform for those who have failed to deliver accountable government.
2027 must be about competence.
Capacity.
Character.
Accountability.
Results.
Nigeria does not need another political Messiah who asks citizens to worship statistics while their kitchens are empty.
Nigeria needs leadership that understands that government exists to improve the lives of the governed.
The Nigerian people are not animals on Animal Farm.
We are citizens.
And the question in 2027 is not who will give us something to eat for one day.
It is:
WHO WILL FIX THE FARM?
The time has come for Nigerians to reclaim their country, not with violence, but with the most powerful instrument available to a democracy: their votes.
2027 is the opportunity to replace the politics of patronage with the politics of performance; the politics of statistics with the economics of prosperity; and the politics of opacity with the government of accountability.
The farm belongs to the people.
And the people must decide who sits at the table.
Alex Ter Adum, PhD
DDG THE NARRATIVE FORCE
