Nigeria’s political elite have long mastered the art of speaking at citizens rather than to them. The Director-General of the Budget Office’s recent defense of government fiscal policy is a masterclass in this tradition. His piece reads less as a clarification and more as a knee-jerk, elitist lecture. While methodically explaining the technicalities of public finance to what he implies is an uneducated public, he commits a far greater error: he completely sidesteps the fundamental issue of public finance accountability.
The DG misses the heart of the issue. Public finance is not an accounting exercise—not the usual naira and kobo, additions and subtractions—but a social contract. Citizens surrender resources—taxes, tolerance of debt and hardship—in exchange for public goods: security, infrastructure, opportunity. Accountability is about proving that contract is being honoured. When a mother in Kano pays ₦1,000 per litre for kerosene to cook her family’s evening meal—triple what she paid two years ago—she is not asking about ‘federation-wide collections versus federal retained revenue.’ She is asking: What did you do with my sacrifice? Discussing only the accounting of the surrender, while being vague on the delivery of the goods, breaks that contract in the public’s mind.
This brings us to the subsidy. The government’s argument is that removal “freed up funds.” While it is not a cash injection, it theoretically creates fiscal space—an opportunity to fund services without immediately sourcing new debt. But here lies the crux of my argument, a point the DG’s technical lecture ignored: If the funds used to fill the subsidy hole for years were borrowed, and we are still servicing that old debt, then have we truly plugged the hole? Or have we simply stopped adding new water to a bucket that is still leaking from the bottom?
We didn’t just stop an expense; we are still paying for it through ongoing debt service. Whether the debt was taken directly for subsidies or for other needs crowded out by subsidy spending, the cost remains. The so-called “freed funds” are, in part, an illusion if they are merely the funds we are no longer borrowing this year to pay for last year’s subsidy. The real “savings” only materialise if the termination of new borrowing leads to a visible shift in resources—from debt repayment to tangible public goods. Where is that shift? The DG’s silence on this question is not an oversight. It is a confession. There remains a lot that he has not explained to the average Nigerian.
This evasion feels deliberate and increases public suspicion, leading to the central, visceral question his piece failed to address: Why can’t we feel any benefit? We understand the theory. We grasp that ending the subsidy “closes a fiscal hole.” But for citizens, that hole was filled with their purchasing power. The promised redirection of funds remains an abstract line in a budget, while the pain is a daily, grinding reality. Investments take time, but the public’s agony is in the present tense. This is made worse by persistently high transport costs and the removal of the power subsidy. The government created a three-tier tariff structure whose principles are being systematically ignored. Citizens are being migrated to the highest band—not based on service quality, but to fill the coffers of distribution companies who still fail to provide the baseline power they promised.
And when the NBS celebrates falling inflation from cheaper food, we must ask: at what cost? Those lower prices come from imported staples, not from thriving Nigerian farms struggling under prohibitive fertiliser costs. We’re trading food security for favourable statistics—another form of masking tape over structural problems.
What Transparency Actually Looks Like
I am not sure the DG understands what transparency truly means. He reduces it to the numbers he’s mandated to manage, focusing on theoretical constructs while ignoring the lived reality behind every government policy- the lost lives due to poor health care services, the hungry children, the workers who trek to work. The DG says the proper way to interrogate government is to “examine federal retained revenue; separate it from financing; track expenditure across debt service, personnel, capital, and transfers; and assess outputs.” He presents this as if critics are avoiding the hard work of analysis. In truth, this data is either unavailable or deliberately opaque.
Fine. We accept the challenge. Publish:
- Federal retained revenue for 2023 and 2024, broken down by source.
- Debt service payments as a percentage of revenue, with a breakdown of principal vs. interest—specifically, how much we’re still paying on debt incurred to finance the subsidy regime we supposedly ended.
- Capital expenditure by sector, with completion rates for ongoing projects.
- Measurable outputs: kilometres of road completed, megawatts of power added, hospital beds increased, schools rehabilitated.
The DG says critics should demand this data. We do. Where is it?
A government that asks us to make sacrifices must, with ruthless transparency, show us what it is building with our sacrifice—and prove the hole is truly sealed rather than just being covered up with masking tape.
The DG has demonstrated his office understands the arithmetic of finance. What remains in doubt is whether it understands the ethics of accountability. Because without transparency, ‘Tinubunomics’ sounds less like policy reform and more like a sophisticated way of saying: ‘Trust us, stop counting, and don’t ask too many questions.’ We expect and demand more from Tinubunomics, not just the elitist ramblings that promise much but deliver little.
We’re still counting. And we’re still asking.
Haroon Alrashid writes on public policy and economic accountability.
