The ghost at the Nigerian economic banquet is no longer a phantom, it has assumed the concrete shape of a ledger entry, inked in trillions of naira and stamped with the seal of consecutive administrations that promised fiscal redemption but delivered a deepening paradox. When raw numbers are flung across political pulpits,the eighty-seven trillion naira accumulated across eight years under Muhammadu Buhari pitted against the staggering surge past one hundred and fifty-seven trillion naira under Bola Tinubu in less than half that time,the public space transforms into an arena of profound cognitive dissonance.
This is not merely a statistical contest. It is a moral and structural crisis that cuts straight to the core of the Nigerian social contract. When Atiku Abubakar and other opposition voices deploy the subsidy counter-poise, they are not just playing partisan politics, they are seizing upon the most agonizing contradiction of contemporary Nigerian governance.
If the removal of the petroleum subsidy and the unification of exchange rates were supposed to halt the bleeding, stop the cycle of reckless borrowings, and free up monumental fiscal space, why does the national debt profile look like a runaway train? Where did the trillions go, and why does the ordinary citizen bear a heavier cross today than under the regime they were told was destroying the country?
To evaluate this reality with absolute clinical precision, we must move beyond the superficial trap of nominal naira numbers, because raw naira values in a floating exchange rate regime lie by omission.
When analysts throw around the headline figure of over one hundred and fifty trillion naira, they are capturing an optical illusion created by two seismic policy shifts.
The first is the painful reality of exchange rate devaluation. When the official value of the naira was allowed to float, legacy foreign-currency debts inherited from the past administration were instantly revalued at a much weaker rate.
A dollar of external debt recorded at a managed rate under Buhari translated to nearly triple the naira value overnight under Tinubu, bloating the nominal debt ledger without the current administration receiving a single extra cent of foreign loans.
The second mechanism is the legal recognition of hidden sins. For years, the Buhari administration financed its monumental deficits through the backdoor via the Central Bank’s Ways and Means advances,an unmitigated printing press binge that bypassed parliamentary oversight.
When the Tinubu administration assumed office, those secret overdrafts were legally securitized and brought out into the open air of public debt statistics. In pure dollar terms, actual net external borrowing has crawled upward at a relatively modest pace, but in the domestic theater of naira-denominated ledgers, the numbers exploded.
Herein lies the trap, and here is where the political class digs its own grave. Even if macro-economists can brilliantly explain exchange rate revaluations and balance-sheet transparency in air-conditioned seminar rooms, they cannot eat excuses. They cannot explain to a citizen why the total abolition of a multi-trillion-naira fuel subsidy,a sacrifice sold as the bitter pill that would cure the national economy has yielded bloated sub-national federation accounts while plunging millions into multidimensional poverty.
If the subsidy money was saved, it vanished into the gaping black hole of debt-servicing obligations, structural leakages, and consumption-driven governance. The tragedy of the Tinubu administration is not merely that it inherited a broken balance sheet, it is that it doubled down on the very logic of supreme sacrifice without providing a visible, transformative dividend. The structural holes were simply plugged with new suffering, leaving the subsidy question hanging like a guillotine over the presidency.
When Atiku rattles the cage with the subsidy counter-poise, he exposes a fatal communication and philosophical vacuum. An administration cannot claim to have liberated the economy from the parasite of subsidy corruption while simultaneously pointing to a ballooning debt burden as an unalterable act of God. If the subsidy was evil, its removal should have birthed a golden age of infrastructural renaissance and fiscal breathing room. The absence of that golden age leaves a vacuum that the opposition will exploit until the cows come home.
This is the definitive story of our time.A nation trapped between the arithmetic of deception and the brutal honesty of empty pockets.
The debate is no longer about who borrowed more, but why a country so richly endowed continues to mortgage its tomorrow to pay for the administrative overhead of today, leaving its people to wander through a wasteland of unfulfilled promises while the ledger bleeds red.
Stephanie Shaakaa
shaakaastephanie02@gmail.com
08034861434
