Tinubunomics: The Painful Cure, The Borrowed Bet, And The Hope For A Richer Nigeria
Imagine a country that was earning money but had nothing to show for it. A country where the government was paying almost everything it earned just to service old debts, where the currency had two prices, one for the connected and one for everyone else, where petrol was cheap on paper but scarce in reality, and where 27 states could not pay their workers. That is the Nigeria Bola Tinubu inherited in May 2023, according to his Minister of Finance, Taiwo Oyedele. And that is why Tinubunomics was born, not as a slogan, but as a shock therapy meant to stop a collapse.
Tinubunomics, as Oyedele explains it, rests on a simple belief: Nigeria cannot spend its way to prosperity by hiding costs. For fifty years, from 1973 when petrol sold for six kobo, to 2023 when it sold for 195 naira, government tried to protect Nigerians by subsidising fuel. Each time the price went up, people suffered, but the problem never went away. The subsidy rewarded smugglers, round-trippers and the highly connected, while starving schools, roads, hospitals and the federation account. On 29 May 2023, Tinubu removed it. At the same time, he unified the exchange rate, ending the system where a few people could buy dollars cheap from the Central Bank and sell them expensive on the street. It was painful, and deliberately so. Oyedele does not hide the pain. He says the economy was weeks away from collapse, with inflation at 22.41 per cent, usable reserves of only 859 million dollars, a parallel market premium of over 60 per cent, debt service consuming 97 per cent of revenue, and over 30 trillion naira already printed through Ways and Means, worth more than 20 billion dollars at the time. In his telling, there was no painless option, only a choice between painful reform now or catastrophic collapse later.
From that starting point, Tinubunomics built four pillars. The first is subsidy removal and exchange rate unification, already described. The second is revenue mobilisation, the attempt to make Nigeria earn more from what it already has. Oyedele gives numbers no previous minister has given so openly. Between June 2023 and December 2025, subsidy savings mobilised 15.8 trillion naira, 5.4 trillion to the Federal Government and 10.4 trillion to states and local governments. Added to 3.1 trillion naira in independent revenue and 11.9 trillion naira in borrowing, total new federal resources were 20.4 trillion naira, which funded part of 30.64 trillion naira in new spending. Of that spending, 9.39 trillion went to wages and allowances, 9.37 trillion went to debt service made heavier by devaluation, and 6.5 trillion went to infrastructure. His summary is that two thirds was funded by new resources and one third, about 10 trillion naira, came from the existing revenue base, even though the printing of naira had stopped. In another formulation, about two thirds went directly to average Nigerians through wages, infrastructure, electricity subsidy and social transfers, and the balance went to stabilising the economy. Tax to GDP, he says, has risen from barely 7 per cent in 2023 to about 12.5 per cent at the end of 2025, Federation Account allocation grew 44 per cent from 2024 to 2025, and is projected to grow another 50 per cent to 2026. This is the heart of Tinubunomics: stop printing money, stop hiding subsidy, start collecting tax fairly, and let the federation share more.
The third pillar is direct help to ordinary people, the part Oyedele uses to answer the question, if the economy is improving, why am I still hungry. He points to 372.6 billion naira disbursed through NELFUND to more than 1.5 million students, so parents do not have to worry about tuition and stipend. He points to more than 600 billion naira in cash transfers to more than 10 million households, with a target of at least 15 million. He points to over 800,000 small businesses receiving single digit loans, mostly through the Bank of Industry. He points to tax exemptions for low income earners earning up to 100,000 naira per month, and for small businesses with turnover up to 100 million naira, which he says covers 97 per cent of over 40 million small businesses, exempting them from corporate income tax, VAT and withholding tax. He points to a capital market that has grown from about 30 trillion naira to over 160 trillion naira, where more than 90 per cent of investors are small investors now granted capital gains tax exemptions. In his interpretation, Tinubunomics is not just macroeconomics, it is an attempt to build a new social contract where the poor are not taxed to subsidise the rich, and where the state helps directly rather than through a leaky fuel subsidy.
The fourth pillar is the most controversial, and the one that has defined the debate in October 2026: the 21.7 billion dollar supplementary external borrowing plan. It comprises 20.52 billion dollars and 1.045 billion euros, submitted to the National Assembly on 27 October 2026, covering 46 projects across 11 sectors over five years. Oyedele insists it does not qualify as borrowing, it qualifies as investment. About 10.6 billion dollars is for transportation, including Lagos-Calabar, Sokoto-Badagry and Kano-Kaduna Metro Rail, with ten flagship projects accounting for 58 per cent at 12.5 billion dollars. Four billion dollars is for social sectors, agriculture, energy, social protection, climate and education, funded entirely on concessional terms. About 7.9 billion dollars will come from multilateral and bilateral partners, led by the World Bank with 5 billion dollars at an average rate of 2.1 per cent, while the commercial component averages 7.8 per cent, below Nigeria’s November 2025 Eurobond yield of 9.1 to 9.6 per cent. He stresses that 4.8 billion dollars is not for the Federal Government alone, but for states, the FCT and agencies, with 3.3 billion directly to states and 1.45 billion through the Bank of Industry, Development Bank of Nigeria, TCN and DisCos, because the Federal Government has the constitutional duty to be the interface for all external borrowing. On the same day, the Federal Executive Council approved ten memos, including 155.9 million euros from Deutsche Bank to upgrade power substations, 970 million dollars from Standard Chartered and Africa Finance Corporation for rolling stock on the Kano-Maradi rail line, and 76.8 million euros from the ECOWAS Bank to Bauchi State for roads. His famous analogy is Dangote: if Dangote had tried to save to build his refinery, it would not have been built in his lifetime, he had to take financing, and the 20 billion dollar refinery is now listed and its value has more than doubled. To the extent you borrow one naira to create value of more than one naira, you should please borrow more, he says, asking in which country on this planet do you run an economy without borrowing.
That is Tinubunomics as its chief salesman tells it. The critics tell a different story, and their standing must be taken seriously because they are not just shouting, they are pointing to real risks. Their first standing is on debt. Total public debt was 166.79 trillion naira as of 30 June 2026, up from 159.35 trillion in March, and external debt was 54.5 billion dollars. Independent estimates suggest the new plan could add about 1.2 billion dollars to annual external interest, pushing it from about 3 billion to 4.2 billion dollars. Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the ADC, urged the Senate to suspend approval until government publishes a project by project breakdown, costs, locations, contractors, loan conditions and repayment obligations. Peter Obi has claimed Tinubu has borrowed nearly 100 billion dollars with nothing to show. Their argument is that Nigeria is swapping one unsustainable burden, subsidy, for another, debt service, and that the government has not shown how highways and rails will generate enough cash to repay their loans. Their second standing is on transparency and politics. The plan is a framework with sectors and flagships, not a fully costed, publicly auditable list, and critics fear it could become a slush fund ahead of the 2027 elections, especially because Lagos-Calabar and Sokoto-Badagry are politically symbolic mega projects with contested returns. Their third standing is on distribution and lived experience. Even if growth has accelerated from 2.74 per cent in May 2023 to 4.43 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, with dollar term growth at 17 per cent in the first half of 2026, inflation has fallen from a peak of about 34 per cent to 14.63 per cent in September 2026, from 20.98 per cent a year earlier, month on month food inflation fell by 1.55 per cent, reserves have risen to an 18 year high of over 55 billion dollars with net reserves over 45 billion, a 45 fold increase, the naira trades between 1,330 and 1,350 to the dollar, debt service to revenue has fallen from 97 per cent to under 60 per cent, Fitch, Moody’s and S&P have all upgraded Nigeria, Nigeria has exited the FATF grey list and the EU deficiency list, the question remains: why can ordinary Nigerians still not afford food, transport and school fees. Six hundred billion naira to 10 million households is 60,000 naira per household over three years, about 1,600 naira per month, which cannot offset petrol moving from 195 naira to about 1,400 naira after Brent crude rose above 100 dollars and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz fell to 13 per cent of pre-war levels. NELFUND helps students, but not the market woman whose transport cost has tripled. The critics are therefore right that macro success and micro suffering can coexist, and that a government can be right on numbers and still lose the argument on the street.
Oyedele’s response to the subsidy critics is equally revealing. In the 8 October briefing on fuel prices and the subsidy question, he warned that returning to subsidy would cost over 20 trillion naira yearly at 50 million litres daily, and even fixing petrol at 500 naira would cost over 16 trillion naira, before smuggling and extra consumption. He estimated the exchange rate could approach 3,000 naira to the dollar within months, and so called subsidised petrol would cost at least 2,000 naira per litre, well above today’s price. A subsidy does not lower the cost of fuel, he said, it only changes how it is paid and when, and however it is described, it must be financed through salaries not paid on time, higher taxes, or printing money. He challenged any proposal to answer three questions: what will it cost, how will it be funded sustainably, and what pump price will it deliver. He rejected the idea of a production subsidy for local refining as not a true production subsidy, because a true one supports a producer who cannot compete at market prices, while this is a discount on crude passed through to the pump, in effect a subsidy on foreign exchange. This is a strong fiscal argument, but it rests on a forecast, not a certainty. The 3,000 naira and 2,000 naira figures assume a chain reaction of downgrade, capital flight and collapse, which is plausible but not inevitable. The debate, therefore, is not subsidy versus no subsidy in the abstract, it is about who bears the cost of a global oil shock, transparently through the pump and targeted transfers, as Oyedele prefers, or hidden through the budget and exchange rate, as his opponents prefer.
On food and the naira, Oyedele makes his boldest promises. On food, the Federal Executive Council adopted a 90 day action plan coordinated with states, with the short term goal that rice, yam, beans and maize remain stable or come down by the end of the year, by mapping the gap between consumption and production, importing only unprocessed brown rice to protect local milling jobs, expanding irrigation for year round farming, improving yields through science, and cutting post harvest losses. His vision is that Nigeria will not only be food sufficient, prices will be stable and affordable, and we will export, and a lot of it will be processed before we export, and there is nothing that says people cannot be rich doing farming. On the naira, he says even the IMF estimates it is about 25 per cent undervalued, so anybody who wants to bet against the naira should make provision for their losses, and the currency to hold is the naira, even more than the dollar or pound sterling. Both promises are attempts to anchor expectations, and both are hostages to fortune. If irrigation is not built, if insecurity persists in farming areas, if oil prices fall or election spending loosens discipline, food prices and the naira could disappoint, and his words will be used against him. The fact that he himself warns subsidy return could push the naira to 3,000 shows he knows how fragile the currency still is.
The impacts and the hope, therefore, are conditional but real. In the short term, if the 90 day food plan works, if the 8 October measures, the 30 day NNPC margin discount, the 1,350 naira ceiling on ex gantry or landing cost, and tax waivers saving 400 to 600 naira per litre, actually reach the pump, and if cash transfers and credit reach the right people, Nigerians may feel some relief before the end of the year. In the medium term, if single digit inflation is achieved by the end of 2027 or earlier, as council resolved, real wages could recover, and if the 21.7 billion dollar projects actually start, construction jobs, lower logistics costs, more reliable power and better roads could raise productivity and attract private investment. In the long term, the hope of Tinubunomics is a Nigeria that is food sufficient, that exports processed goods, that has a diversified tax base, that has a deep capital market for small investors, and that is counted by the IMF among the top ten contributors to global growth. That hope is not fantasy, it is grounded in real improvements in growth, inflation, reserves and credit ratings. But it is fragile, because it depends on continuity, on projects delivered on time and on budget at the rates quoted, on fiscal discipline through the election cycle, which council itself admitted is under threat, and on a next administration that does not reverse reform for political gain. If infrastructure is delivered, Nigeria could enter 2027 and 2028 with lower logistics costs, lower food prices and single digit inflation. If it is not, Nigeria will have swapped one unsustainable burden for another, and the next minister will be giving the same speech about collapse, with different numbers. The final truth of Tinubunomics, then, is that both sides are partly right. The reforms have created fiscal space and improved macro indicators, and the borrowing plan could build transformative assets. But without full project disclosure, independent cost benefit analysis, and a clear path to repaying the 21.7 billion dollars from project revenues rather than general revenue, the promise that this qualifies as investment will remain a political claim, not an economic fact. The hope is conditional, and the condition is delivery.
