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?

A mature democracy distinguishes between allegation and evidence, inquiry and guilt, accusation and proof. To collapse those distinctions is to weaponize suspicion and undermine the very constitutional order critics claim to defend. One cannot selectively believe in institutions only when outcomes align with partisan expectations.

The Weaponization of Allegation as Political Economy

What is increasingly evident in contemporary discourse is the collapse of analytical rigor into prosecutorial sensationalism. Allegations are casually elevated into conclusions, investigations are rhetorically transformed into convictions, and parliamentary inquiries are treated as substitutes for judicial determination.

This is profoundly dangerous for constitutional democracy.

If oversight institutions of the National Assembly are investigating claims, then intellectual honesty requires restraint pending evidentiary findings. The mere existence of an allegation does not establish factual guilt. In every serious democracy, inquiry is a process of verification, not a declaration of culpability.

Yet many commentators proceed with astonishing certainty, constructing elaborate political arguments upon matters still under investigation. This betrays not confidence in evidence, but impatience with due process itself.

A mature democratic culture distinguishes carefully between accusation and proof. Once societies normalize the treatment of allegations as established facts, public discourse degenerates into mob adjudication and institutional credibility collapses.

Even more troubling is the selective morality underpinning much of the outrage. Many of those now presenting themselves as guardians of accountability maintained remarkable silence during periods of far deeper fiscal opacity, systemic leakages and structurally ruinous subsidy regimes. Their newfound indignation appears less driven by principle than by political convenience.

There is also a glaring contradiction in the criticism itself. The same voices condemning current fiscal interventions routinely ignore the inherited liabilities, contingent obligations and quasi-fiscal distortions accumulated over many years before the present administration assumed office. They discuss the consequences while deliberately erasing the causes.

No serious economic assessment isolates outcomes from historical context.

One cannot inherit structural disequilibrium built over decades and resolve it within months without difficult transitional adjustments. To pretend otherwise is either economic illiteracy or deliberate political manipulation.

Indeed, some critics now invoke anti-corruption rhetoric as though fiscal expansion itself were evidence of misconduct. This is analytically absurd. Deficit spending is neither criminal nor abnormal. It is one of the oldest instruments of macroeconomic stabilization known to economic theory and modern statecraft.

The relevant questions are whether borrowed resources are directed toward productive stabilization, whether distortions are being corrected, whether institutional reforms are advancing, and whether medium-term growth capacity is being restored. Those are the serious questions of economics — not headline-driven outrage masquerading as analysis.

History repeatedly shows that nations undergoing structural transition often experience intense political resistance precisely because reforms disrupt entrenched rent structures. Those benefiting from previous distortions rarely surrender quietly. They weaponize discomfort, amplify transitional pain and present necessary adjustments as evidence of failure.

But serious governance cannot be reduced to the management of political optics. Statesmanship requires confronting inherited realities, not merely postponing them for applause.

And perhaps the greatest intellectual failure of all is the refusal by some commentators to recognize that economic management involves trade-offs, sequencing and temporal effects. Reforms do not mature instantly. Stabilization precedes expansion. Correction precedes recovery.

Every major economy that eventually achieved durable growth passed through periods of painful adjustment.

Nigeria will not be the first country required to endure transitional difficulty in order to escape structural stagnation.

Markets, the State and Economic Reality

What is most disappointing is the slavish attachment to simplistic market fundamentalism. Every advanced economy in history was built through strategic state intervention. The United States used industrial policy. China used state-directed capital. South Korea relied heavily on developmental financing. Japan deployed coordinated industrial targeting. Europe continues to subsidize strategic sectors extensively.

Yet some local commentators behave as though government intervention is uniquely immoral in Nigeria. That is not economics. It is colonial mimicry disguised as sophistication.

Markets are powerful allocators, but they also fail. They underinvest in public goods, misprice externalities, ignore inequality and collapse under coordination failures. That is precisely why governments exist. Even the most capitalist economies abandon fiscal puritanism during crises. In 2008 governments rescued banks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, trillions of dollars were injected globally through deficit financing because real policymakers govern economies as they are, not as ideological fantasists imagine them to be.

Conclusion

History will not remember who shouted loudest on television panels or social media platforms. History will remember who understood the scale of Nigeria’s structural crisis and had the courage to confront it.

Economic transformation is difficult, disruptive and politically costly. Nations are not rebuilt through selective memory, performative outrage or shallow populism. They are rebuilt through reforms grounded in macroeconomic realism, fiscal pragmatism and strategic long-term thinking.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that many of those condemning deficits today benefited directly from the very fiscal injections they now denounce. Their salaries, contracts, businesses, liquidity positions and consumption patterns were often sustained by the same public spending they now pretend to oppose.

That is not principled opposition. It is selective amnesia.

•Tanimu is the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation.

Update news