By Tanimu Yakubu
Those who speak glibly about deficits, debt and fiscal expansion often reveal not economic sophistication, but economic illiteracy disguised as moral outrage. Much of today’s opposition rhetoric confuses accounting identities with ideological slogans and mistakes macroeconomic intervention for recklessness.
A modern economy is not managed through market romanticism. It is managed through theory, evidence, history and context. The loudest critics of the Tinubu administration speak as though government borrowing is inherently immoral, as though deficits emerge from vice rather than economic necessity, and as though Nigeria’s economic difficulties suddenly materialized on 29 May 2023. Such arguments are neither historically grounded nor economically coherent.
No serious economist — from Keynes to Samuelson, from Krugman to Stiglitz — has argued that governments should retreat into fiscal paralysis during periods of structural imbalance, liquidity stress and inherited distortions. The central insight of modern macroeconomics is precisely the opposite: when private demand weakens, when markets fail to allocate efficiently, or when structural rigidities suppress growth, the state must intervene counter-cyclically to restore equilibrium. That is not ideology. That is orthodox macroeconomics.
Government Spending and Private Sector Income
Those attacking deficit spending behave as though government borrowing is money disappearing into a void. They fundamentally fail to understand the most elementary principle of national income accounting: government expenditure becomes somebody else’s income.
When government spends on infrastructure, security, rail, roads, social transfers or capital projects, that money circulates through the economy as contractor revenues, household income, supplier payments, corporate earnings, pension assets and tax receipts. One sector’s deficit is frequently another sector’s surplus. Indeed, the private sector balances often celebrated by critics are themselves the mirror image of public deficits.
The irony is profound. Many of those condemning public borrowing are often the first to celebrate improved liquidity, increased business activity, rising consumer demand and stronger corporate earnings, even though these outcomes are frequently driven by fiscal injections into the economy. What they denounce politically, they quietly benefit from economically.
Historical Context Matters
Many of the liabilities now being weaponized against the current administration were accumulated over years, including periods when President Tinubu was not in office. Yet propagandists compress decades of structural dysfunction into a single political narrative. That is not analysis; it is propaganda masquerading as economics.
Nigeria’s fiscal vulnerabilities did not begin in 2023. They are the product of decades of fuel subsidy distortions, chronic underinvestment, oil dependency, exchange-rate misalignment, insecurity, weak productivity growth and persistent revenue underperformance. To discuss today’s debt profile without acknowledging yesterday’s accumulated distortions is intellectually dishonest.
Debt Must Be Understood in Context
Serious economists do not assess debt through sensational headlines or absolute figures alone. They assess debt sustainability, debt service capacity, debt composition, maturity structures, currency exposure and debt-to-GDP ratios.
By global standards, Nigeria’s debt-to-GDP ratio remains comparatively modest at 36.9 percent as at December 2025. By comparison, the United States carries debt above 120 percent of GDP, Japan above 250 percent, Singapore above 170 percent, France above 110 percent, the United Kingdom around 100 percent, India above 80 percent and Brazil above 85 percent.
Nigeria therefore remains significantly below many advanced and emerging economies on pure debt stock metrics. The real Nigerian challenge is not simply debt accumulation, but weak revenue mobilization and the productive deployment of borrowed resources. A country with low revenue-to-GDP ratios will naturally face debt-service pressures even at comparatively moderate debt levels. The solution is therefore not performative austerity, but economic expansion, export growth, productivity enhancement, tax-base broadening and structural transformation.
The Nature of Economic Reform
No country reforms an economy painlessly. Not China under Deng Xiaoping. Not India during the reforms of 1991. Not South Korea during industrial restructuring. Not Indonesia after the Asian Financial Crisis. Every serious reform programme produces temporary dislocation before stabilization gains emerge.
What shallow critics casually describe as “hardship” is often the unavoidable transitional cost of dismantling decades of accumulated distortions. Serious reform requires political courage, fiscal realism and long-term strategic discipline. Economies are not transformed through slogans or sentimentality.
Due Process and Democratic Responsibility
There is also a disturbing tendency in public discourse to convert allegations into convictions before institutions conclude investigations. If matters are before the National Assembly or other oversight bodies, how can supposedly educated commentators proceed as though allegations are already established facts? Since when did parliamentary inquiry become equivalent to judicial conviction?
