Minister Oyedele, Where Is the Dividend of Our Sacrifice? By Labaran Saleh

The Finance Minister’s explanation for Nigeria’s continued borrowing does not absolve government — it deepens the indictment

Let us, for the sake of argument, take the Finance Minister at his word.

Speaking recently on why Nigeria continues to borrow despite the much-celebrated removal of fuel subsidy, Mr. Taiwo Oyedele explained that the savings generated from that painful policy decision — and from the foreign exchange reforms that accompanied it — were never meant to sit idle in government coffers. They were, he said, absorbed: by debt servicing, by legacy obligations, by the new minimum wage, by student loans, and by other critical government expenditures.

Very well. Let us accept that explanation in full and follow it to its logical conclusion.

Because what the Minister has just told Nigerians, with considerable confidence and without apparent irony, is this: the sacrifices you made changed nothing structural about how this government manages money. The fiscal space was created and immediately filled by the same pressures that existed before. The borrowing continues. The debt climbs. And the burden remains yours.

That is not a defence of government policy. That is an indictment of it.

For more than three years, Nigerians have been told a consistent story. Fuel subsidy removal was the difficult but unavoidable surgery required to restore fiscal discipline. It would create the breathing room that government needed to invest in infrastructure, reduce waste, and put the nation’s finances on a sustainable trajectory. The pain was real, but it was purposeful. Citizens were asked to endure, and they did.

Petrol prices surged. Transportation costs multiplied. Inflation deepened. The purchasing power of ordinary Nigerians — workers, traders, farmers, pensioners — eroded with a swiftness that left little room for adjustment. The social cost of that transition has been severe and, in many households, irreversible.

Now the Finance Minister comes to tell us that the savings from that transition were consumed by existing obligations.

If that is true, then the reform did not change Nigeria’s fiscal reality. It merely reshuffled it. The government did not become more disciplined; it found a new source to service its old indiscipline. And Nigerians funded that exercise in accounting sleight of hand with their livelihoods.

“The fiscal space was created and immediately filled by the same pressures that existed before. The borrowing continues. The debt climbs. And the burden remains yours.”

Minister Oyedele’s explanation, even if accepted entirely on its own terms, raises questions that cannot be dismissed with generalities.

How much, precisely, was saved from the removal of fuel subsidy? The Nigerian public has a right to that figure — not an approximation, not a range, but a verified number. Of that amount, how much went into debt servicing? How much financed recurrent government expenditure — salaries, allowances, travel, and the relentless overhead of a government that has not demonstrably slimmed itself down? And how much — if any — was channelled into productive assets: infrastructure that expands economic capacity, investments that will reduce the need to borrow in the future?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the minimum standard of accountability owed to a citizenry that was explicitly told it was paying a price in exchange for a better fiscal future. If the Minister can answer them clearly and with evidence, he should do so. If he cannot, then the explanation he has offered is not a defence — it is an evasion dressed in the language of technical economics.

There is also the matter of the foreign exchange reforms. Nigerians who held savings in naira watched the value of those savings collapse as the currency was devalued in the name of unification and market discipline. Importers passed those costs forward. Manufacturers did the same. The consumer absorbed it all. What are the documented gains from that policy that can be set against those losses? Not projections. Not forecasts. Results.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable implication of the Minister’s explanation is the one he did not address: if subsidy savings could be entirely consumed by legacy obligations and existing expenditure pressures, then the problem was never the subsidy itself.

The problem is the structure.

A government that removes a major spending commitment and immediately finds that the savings are insufficient to make a dent in its debt or recurrent obligations has not reformed. It has simply eliminated one pressure valve while the underlying boiler continues to overheat. The debt profile expands. The revenue-to-debt servicing ratio remains punishing. The government borrows to pay for what it spent yesterday, and will borrow tomorrow to pay for what it spends today.

Is this administration’s wage bill leaner than it was three years ago? Is the cost of running the executive arm of government lower? Has the number of government agencies, parastatals, and duplicated functions been rationalised? Has procurement reform reduced the haemorrhage of public funds through inflated contracts? Have the genuine inefficiencies in public spending that reformers promised to address actually been confronted?

If the answers to those questions are yes, let the data be published. If the answers are no, then what, precisely, was the reform?

“A government that removes a major spending commitment and immediately finds that savings are insufficient to dent its debt has not reformed. It has simply eliminated one pressure valve while the boiler continues to overheat.”

Reforms Are Judged by Results, Not Theories

Economic reform is not an act of faith. It cannot be evaluated by the elegance of its underlying theory or the confidence with which its architects defend it. It must be judged by what it produces — measurably, verifiably, and in terms that citizens can understand and interrogate.

The International Monetary Fund may approve of Nigeria’s reform direction. Multilateral lenders may express cautious optimism. Bond markets may react positively to signals of fiscal intent. None of that puts food on Nigerian tables, reduces the cost of sending a child to school, or restores the purchasing power that was extinguished when subsidy was removed.

Nigerians were not asked to sacrifice for the approval of international financial institutions. They were asked to sacrifice for a better Nigeria. The question is whether that Nigeria is materialising — or whether what is materialising is a more indebted, more expensive, and no less inefficient version of what came before.

The burden of proof here is not symmetrical. Government asked for trust. Government asked for patience. Government asked Nigerians to absorb real and immediate economic pain in exchange for promised future gains. That transaction creates an obligation, and the obligation is not discharged by explanation. It is discharged by evidence.

Mr. Oyedele is a competent technocrat. He understands public finance with a depth that most commentators, this writer included, cannot match. That makes his obligation to communicate clearly and specifically all the greater, not lesser.

Nigerians who cannot parse a sovereign debt profile or read a fiscal consolidation matrix can nonetheless tell the difference between a government that is delivering on its promises and one that is providing sophisticated explanations for why it has not. They can feel it in the cost of transport, the price of food, the fee at the school gate, the bill at the clinic.

The Minister owes them not a lecture on fiscal mechanics, but a ledger. A transparent, publicly accessible account of what was saved, where it went, what it produced, and what the honest timeline is for Nigerians to see a return on the sacrifice they were not asked but told to make.

Nigerians accepted the pain because they were promised reform. They are not interested in explanations. They are waiting for evidence. The sacrifice has already been made. The burden of proof now rests entirely with the government that demanded it.

Show us the results.

Labaran Saleh writes from Abuja.