Every budget season in Nigeria follows the same script. The President presents a document with a grand title, the Minister of Finance speaks of fiscal discipline, and the newspapers print photographs of the ceremony. A few weeks later, the ordinary citizen opens his wallet and discovers that the same document has made him poorer. This is not bad luck, and it is not the fault of the weather or the world oil price. It is the predictable outcome of a political order that consumes far more than it produces.
The arithmetic is brutal and it is public. Of the N54.99 trillion budgeted for 2025, N14.32 trillion was set aside for debt servicing while recurrent non-debt expenditure swallowed N13.59 trillion. That is more than half of the national envelope gone before a single road is tarred or a single megawatt is added to the grid. Personnel cost alone has climbed towards N10 trillion. Senators take home as much as N21 million monthly in salary and allowances, and the President’s full package can exceed N100 million a month. The minimum wage, after months of strikes, was settled at N70,000. The gap between those who make the laws and those who obey them is no longer mere inequality; it is a machine for transferring wealth upwards.
Consider how many agencies we run. The Oronsaye Report of 2012 identified over 500 federal agencies, parastatals and commissions, and recommended merging and scrapping a large number of them. More than a decade later, the report has been dusted off, celebrated in press conferences and quietly abandoned in practice. Every agency retained is another board, another fleet of vehicles, another set of allowances, another budget line defended by people whose salaries depend on its survival. Rationalisation threatens too many comfortable livelihoods to survive contact with the National Assembly.
Then there is the electricity we do not generate. Despite privatisation, Nigerians still spend an estimated $14 billion every year buying generators and fuel to power them. That is a private tax paid by households and small businesses to compensate for a public failure. A country that cannot keep its grid standing is a country that has outsourced its industrial policy to importers of diesel. When we floated the naira, we floated it into an economy where manufacturers still cannot compete because they cannot power their factories.
We removed the fuel subsidy and liberalised the exchange rate, but we did not touch the political incentives that made both policies unavoidable. The subsidy cost over $10 billion a year at its peak, and its removal was described as bold and overdue. What followed was a 70 per cent depreciation of the naira, a collapse of dollar GDP from $476 billion in 2022 to $188 billion in 2024, and inflation above 33 per cent by mid-2025. The IMF concedes that growth reached 3.4 per cent in 2024 and that investor confidence improved, but it also records rising poverty and food insecurity. Revenue from subsidy removal, some N15.8 trillion between June 2023 and December 2025, has not produced visible infrastructure or industrial capacity. The money simply travelled from one opaque pipeline into another.
Freeing the naira without fixing power and the ports is not reform; it is devaluation with better branding. The dollar now trades near ₦1,600 and a loaf of bread near ₦1,800, because we still produce almost nothing the world is eager to buy. An economy that imports what it eats and exports what it drills has no buffer when the currency is set free.
We should also count what elections cost us. The 2023 general election swallowed over N305 billion, and the off-cycle governorship contests in Kogi, Imo and Bayelsa added billions more, even as the electoral commission complained of inadequate funding for basic logistics. Add to this the billions voted annually for constituency projects that are notoriously poorly executed, and the security votes that no auditor can properly trace. We are paying premium prices for a democracy that delivers substandard returns.
Worse still is the collapse of confidence. Reform demands shared sacrifice, and shared sacrifice demands trust. Nigerians have sacrificed before, in 1986, in 1993, in 2012 and in 2020, each time assured that tomorrow would be kinder. Tomorrow never arrived. When the National Bureau of Statistics reports inflation at 21.88 per cent while garri has tripled in the market, the citizen stops believing the numbers. The joke on social media, ‘Na statistics we go chop?’_, is not cynicism for its own sake; it is the sound of a people who have learnt that official data and market reality are two different countries. When palliatives meant for the poorest are discovered in warehouses and in the homes of politicians, belief in good intentions dies with it. Relief cannot be delivered through a corrupt pipe.
The World Bank has confirmed what the market already knew. Poverty rose from 56 per cent in 2023 to 61 per cent in 2024, and to 63 per cent in 2025, roughly 140 million Nigerians below the poverty line. Household incomes have not kept pace with still-elevated prices, and the accumulated shock of past inflation continues to erode real earnings. Macroeconomic statistics may improve while households worsen, because the political system that should transmit the gains is broken at every joint.
No investor fears a bad policy as much as he fears that a new minister will rewrite the rules, or that a contract signed today will be worthless in court tomorrow. That fear is political, not economic. Nigeria is routinely classified as a hybrid regime, with electoral integrity scores below the global average, undermined by irregularities, vote buying and weak enforcement. The consequence is measurable. Countries with stronger institutions and lower perceived corruption, such as Botswana, Rwanda and Mauritius, have kept inflation comparatively low. Sound institutions anchor prices. Our difficulty is not a shortage of economic ideas; it is that our political system cannot credibly commit to any of them.
The proposals are already on the table. The 2025 Constitution Review has before it 87 amendment bills touching power devolution, state police, electoral reform and judicial restructuring, and 91 per cent of Nigerians support mandatory electronic transmission of results. Local government autonomy, true fiscal federalism and a leaner federal executive await debate. But the men and women who must approve these changes are precisely those who profit from the present arrangement, and they will not saw off the branch they are sitting on without pressure from below.
So what should the Nigerian voter do? Begin by making the cost of politics the central question of every election. Ask every candidate for the state house and the National Assembly what he earns, how many aides he will appoint, how many vehicles his convoy will carry, and what he will cut. Demand the implementation of the Oronsaye Report in full. Insist that the number of ministers, advisers and agencies be tied to revenue, not to appetite. Refuse to accept ethnicity, religion and personality as the only currencies of campaign season. Until the price of politics becomes an election issue, it will remain an economic burden.
The machine matters more than the product. Our politics is the factory; the economy is only what comes off the assembly line. Repair the factory and the product improves. Leave it as it is, and we shall keep announcing reforms in Abuja, praising ourselves in Lagos, and paying for them in Bodija, Aba and Gusau.
Fẹ́mi Akínṣọlá is a public affairs analyst and development commentator.
