The Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Tanimu Yakubu, has pushed back strongly against growing public criticism of President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms, describing many viral claims about missing trillions of naira as “arithmetic illusion” rather than economic analysis.
In a forceful opinion piece titled “Tinubunomics and the Arithmetic of Illusion”, Yakubu accused critics of deliberately or ignorantly conflating key concepts in public finance, thereby misleading Nigerians with exaggerated figures and false conclusions about government revenue and spending.
The statement, shared on Sunday by presidential aide Bayo Onanuga via X, comes amid heightened scrutiny of Nigeria’s tax reforms, subsidy removal, and rising debt profile under the Tinubu administration.
Yakubu argued that much of the outrage surrounding figures such as ₦150 trillion to ₦180 trillion allegedly generated by the Federal Government is rooted in a basic failure to distinguish between revenue, cash, and financing, as well as between federation-wide collections and funds actually available to the Federal Government.
“This is not an economic analysis. It is an arithmetic illusion,” Yakubu wrote.
According to him, borrowing is frequently and wrongly presented as income, while oil revenues, tax collections, customs receipts, and so-called subsidy savings are casually lumped together to produce dramatic headline figures that do not reflect fiscal reality.
Yakubu clarified that borrowing creates future obligations and cannot be equated with earned revenue, while federation revenues are shared among federal, state, and local governments, meaning they cannot be treated as money solely available to Abuja.
He also addressed claims that fuel subsidy removal generated a massive pool of cash, explaining that subsidy reform merely plugged fiscal leakages that previously appeared as arrears, under-recoveries, and opaque obligations.
“Reform closes a hole. It does not produce a vault of idle cash,” he noted.
On Nigeria’s rising debt profile, Yakubu said a significant portion of the increase in naira terms is due to exchange-rate revaluation of existing foreign debt, not fresh borrowing — an accounting reality often misrepresented as reckless fiscal expansion.
Defending Tinubu’s economic strategy, Yakubu stressed that Tinubunomics was never sold as a quick fix, but as a structural reset aimed at restoring price signals, strengthening revenue administration, and rebuilding macroeconomic credibility under severe inherited constraints.
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These constraints, he said, include heavy debt servicing obligations, security spending, legacy arrears, and constitutional transfers.
He warned that reducing national finance to a “household ledger” would always manufacture scandal, insisting that true accountability must be rooted in audit logic, not social media outrage.
Yakubu concluded that the proper way to assess government performance is by examining federal retained revenue, separating it from financing, tracking expenditures transparently, and evaluating real-world outcomes such as infrastructure delivery, power supply, transportation, healthcare, and education.
“Anything else is not scrutiny. It is theatre,” he said.
The statement adds to an intensifying national debate over economic hardship, tax reforms, and fiscal transparency, as the Tinubu administration seeks to defend its policies against mounting public skepticism.