The Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Tanimu Yakubu, has explained that Tinubunomics was never intended to deliver instant prosperity but to serve as a tough and carefully sequenced macro-fiscal reset implemented under significant constraints.
Yakubu made this known in a policy note titled “Tinubunomics and the Arithmetic of Illusion,” where he cautioned against what he described as misleading public narratives driven by exaggerated headline figures rather than sound public finance analysis. He said much of the criticism of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s fiscal framework arises from a failure to properly distinguish between revenue, cash and financing, as well as between total federation revenues and what the Federal Government actually retains and can spend.
According to him, Tinubunomics was conceived as a response to difficult realities such as inherited debt service obligations, foreign-exchange adjustments, security expenditures, outstanding arrears and competing constitutional responsibilities, rather than as a pledge of immediate abundance.
Yakubu rejected claims circulating online that the Federal Government had access to ₦150 trillion or more, describing such figures as products of “arithmetic illusion” rather than serious economic reasoning. He stressed that borrowing should not be confused with income, noting that it merely provides financing and creates future obligations. He added that federation-wide receipts are often wrongly equated with federal spending capacity, even though the two are not the same.
He further observed that critics frequently bundle tax revenues and oil earnings without clarifying whether the figures are gross or net, federation-wide or federally retained, or whether costs and statutory deductions have been applied. Customs revenues, he said, are often double-counted, while borrowing is presented “as if it were free money.”
On the removal of fuel subsidies, Yakubu explained that the reform did not create an immediate pool of cash for government spending. Rather, it eliminated long-standing fiscal leakages that previously appeared as arrears, opaque deductions and quasi-fiscal liabilities. As a result, any fiscal gains from the reform emerge gradually, not as sudden, spendable savings.
Addressing concerns about Nigeria’s rising debt stock, he noted that much of the increase in naira terms is due to the revaluation of existing foreign-currency debt following exchange-rate adjustments, not necessarily new borrowing. He described attempts to portray this as fresh debt accumulation as a misunderstanding of basic accounting principles.
Yakubu also emphasized that in a federal system, revenues are shared according to statutory rules, and that the Federal Government’s actual budget position is determined by retained revenue plus deficit financing, not by gross inflows aggregated for political effect.
He concluded by calling for more informed and rigorous public debate, urging Nigerians to evaluate government performance using proper audit logic rather than sensational numbers.
“Anything else is not scrutiny; it is theatre,” he said, adding that no amount of “theatrical arithmetic” can replace fiscal discipline.
