Nigeria got two competing narratives about the Tinubu administration’s fiscal management this past weekend, one built around ribbon-cuttings in Borno State, the other around a Washington-flagged accounting gap that opposition figures say should end the presidency altogether.
The infrastructure story centers on Minister of Works David Umahi, who used the flag-off of the Bama-Banki and Dikwa-Gamboru-Ngala road projects to argue that Tinubu’s highway spending doubles as a security strategy. Reviving projects some of which had sat dormant since 2006, Umahi framed better roads in the North-east as both an economic lifeline and a logistics upgrade for troops still confronting insurgency remnants. Vice President Kashim Shettima, standing in for Tinubu, made the same case from a different angle, arguing that impassable roads are themselves a security liability because they limit how effectively forces can patrol contested areas. Borno Governor Babagana Zulum called the projects a milestone in his state’s recovery, and Dangote Group chief Aliko Dangote used the occasion to reveal his company is independently building roughly 1,000 kilometres of roads nationwide at a cost above ₦3 trillion, a scale that reinforced the day’s overall message of momentum and investment.
The other story is considerably less flattering. Peter Obi, the NDC’s presidential candidate, seized on findings from an IMF Article IV Consultation showing that roughly ₦8.83 trillion in 2025 government spending, about two percent of GDP, never appeared in Nigeria’s official budget. Obi called it proof of grand corruption and repeated a demand he first made days earlier, that Tinubu resign. He argued the sum dwarfs Nigeria’s combined education and health budgets and that properly deployed, it could have funded job creation and infrastructure at a scale the country badly needs. “This is not an isolated incident, it is part of a pattern of grand corruption that characterises this administration,” he said.
There’s a wrinkle in that framing, though. It was reported that the unbudgeted spending may actually be linked to recovered funds like the Abacha loot, which foreign governments returning the money require be tied to specific projects, including the Second Niger Bridge and the Lagos-Ibadan and Abuja-Kaduna highways. If accurate, that would mean at least part of the “missing” spending was directed toward exactly the kind of infrastructure Umahi was celebrating in Borno, not diverted from it.
That nuance hasn’t slowed the broader criticism. The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria called the IMF findings, if confirmed, one of the gravest fiscal transparency failures in Nigeria’s democratic history, and said the government’s response through Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele has been inadequate given the scale of the allegations. The Alliance for Economic Research and Ethics pushed the numbers further, calculating that once the unbudgeted spending is factored back in, Nigeria’s real 2025 fiscal deficit climbs from an officially reported 4.4 percent of GDP to roughly 6.4 percent, well above the three percent ceiling set by ECOWAS convergence rules.
Taken together, the weekend captured a government simultaneously showcasing tangible infrastructure wins and fending off questions about whether trillions in spending happened entirely outside public view, questions that, whatever the ultimate explanation, the administration has yet to answer with the documentary detail critics are demanding.
