By Nnaoke Ufere, PhD*
President Tinubu has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of both the meritocratic instinct and the political will required to place talent where it matters most. This failure of leadership is especially indefensible given Nigeria’s depth of human capital.
Nigeria has no shortage of world-class economists and professional managers capable of confronting its challenges. Yet despite this abundance of expertise, President Tinubu, like his predecessors, continues to privilege party loyalty, personal fealty, and tribal allegiance over competence and results.
The consequences of that choice are now undeniable. Nigeria is bleeding, and responsibility for reversing course rests squarely at the top.
President Bola Tinubu must act immediately by removing Wale Edun, Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy; Atiku Bagudu, Minister of Budget and Economic Planning; Jumoke Oduwole, Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment; and Yemi Cardoso, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. There should be no delay and no excuses.
These officials collectively control fiscal policy, economic planning, trade and investment, and monetary and credit conditions. TTogether, they have overseen a historic failure. They must go for the nation to begin the difficult but necessary work of healing, renewal, and restoration of trust.
Any government serious about raising output, employment, and incomes must understand and competently manage the three core levers of macroeconomic policy.
These are fiscal policy, which governs taxation and public spending and anchors inflation expectations; monetary policy, which determines interest rates, liquidity, currency stability, and inflation outcomes; and credit policy, which shapes the availability, cost, and direction of lending across the economy. Tinubu’s economic team has failed on all three.
When these three levers are aligned toward expansion, growth accelerates. When they are misaligned, the economy stalls or contracts, regardless of how bold the reform rhetoric sounds. This is basic economics that President Bola Tinubu and his economic team should have mastered long ago. Their current performance suggests they did not. It appears someone slept through economics 101 classes.
Fiscal Policy Mess: Higher Taxes, Bigger Spending, Weaker Growth
Fiscal policy is the most visible lever of government action. It determines how much the government extracts from the economy and how much it injects back through spending.
In periods of weak growth, orthodox economics and historical experience both suggest that fiscal policy should lean toward stimulus.
This does not mean reckless spending, but it does mean avoiding measures that suppress demand, investment, and consumption when the private sector is already under strain.
Under the Tinubu administration, the current fiscal stance moves decisively in the opposite direction of growth. The aggressive push to raise internally generated revenue through new and higher taxes may make sense from a narrow bookkeeping perspective, especially in the face of mounting fiscal pressures, but it is deeply problematic from a growth standpoint.
It’s a known fact that taxation changes economic behavior. Under President Tinubu’s new tax regime, sharp increases in taxes are being imposed on an economy already strained by double-digit inflation, a weakened naira, rising fuel and transport costs, and falling real incomes. If economic expansion is the stated goal, these conditions leave households and businesses with little capacity to absorb additional fiscal pressure.
This so-called reform shifts the tax burden onto middle- and upper-income Nigerians, punishes capital formation, and chokes medium-sized businesses, the true engine of jobs and growth, while leaving large corporations largely untouched.
In reality, big companies rarely pay anything close to the 30 percent corporate tax rate, if they pay anything at all, protected by loopholes, influence, and weak enforcement, while smaller firms are pursued relentlessly. By making success more expensive, the policy actively discourages ambition, investment, and expansion.
But the real crisis has never been tax rates; it is a broken tax administration riddled with bribery, corruption, intimidation, and extortion. Raising and broadening taxes without fixing this rot simply rewards evasion, punishes honesty, and deepens public distrust in government.
The immediate result will be a sharp compression of demand. Households will cut back on basic consumption, while businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, will delay expansion, freeze hiring, or shut down altogether, shrinking the productive base the government seeks to tax.
Rather than stimulating growth, the current tax regime will suppress spending and investment, directly contradicting the goal of broad-based economic expansion announced by the president last year.
As formal costs rise, more economic activity will be pushed into the informal sector, where survival increasingly depends on remaining outside the administration’s tax net.
The result will be a system that extracts more from a narrowing pool of compliant workers and firms, undermining revenue sustainability and eroding confidence in the economy. That these consequences were neither anticipated nor mitigated reflects a troubling failure of economic judgment.
At the same time, public spending has expanded largely through borrowing, often at punishing interest rates. Borrowing can support growth when it is directed toward productivity-enhancing infrastructure that is well chosen and efficiently executed. But that is not what is happening.
Under the Tinubu administration, borrowing to fund recurrent expenditure and poorly targeted interventions has become routine rather than exceptional. This pattern of financing does not build productive capacity or raise long-term output. It merely shifts today’s fiscal burden onto the future while actively crowding out private investment.
As the federal government absorbs an ever larger share of domestic savings through high-yield debt issuance, it leaves less capital available for businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises that form the backbone of employment, innovation, and broad-based growth. This is economic myopia and self-sabotage.
The combination of higher taxes and rising public borrowing is therefore doubly contractionary. Taxes weaken private demand, while borrowing pushes up interest rates and reduces credit availability. Fiscal policy, instead of cushioning the economy, is amplifying stress within it.
Monetary Policy Failure
Monetary policy has followed an equally restrictive path. In response to inflation, benchmark interest rates have been raised aggressively by the CBN since 2023. The stated objective is price stability, which is a legitimate and necessary goal. Persistent inflation erodes incomes, distorts planning, and undermines confidence.
However, inflation in Nigeria is not a single problem with a single solution. The source of inflation matters. Much of today’s price pressure is driven by exchange rate depreciation, higher import costs, energy and fuel price increases, insecurity disrupting food supply, and long-standing structural bottlenecks in transport, power, and logistics.
Inflation rooted in these supply-side shocks does not respond effectively to blunt interest rate hikes. Instead, higher rates choke credit to our farmers, traders, and manufacturers, suppress output and jobs, and leave the real drivers of rising prices largely untouched. Raising interest rates does little to resolve these issues.
What these policies do achieve is a sharp rise in the cost of capital across the Nigerian economy. Firms that might otherwise expand production, invest in new equipment, or improve efficiency are deterred by prohibitively high borrowing costs.
Small businesses, which account for most employment, face tighter credit conditions, higher loan repayments, and shrinking access to finance, while households struggle under rising debt burdens.
The outcome is slower economic growth and weaker job creation. As production is constrained and investment stalls, supply remains tight, allowing inflationary pressures to persist despite monetary tightening. Instead of easing the cost-of-living crisis, policy choices end up reinforcing it.
This is the tragedy of the Tinubu administration’s economic mismanagement: policies meant to restore stability are instead deepening hardship, stifling growth, and leaving Nigerians worse off, with little progress on the structural problems driving inflation in the first place.
Moreover, high interest rates interact with our fiscal policy in damaging ways. As government borrowing costs rise, debt servicing consumes a growing share of our public revenue, leaving less for health, education, infrastructure, and security. This places pressure on the Tinubu administration to extract higher taxes or borrow even more, locking our economy into a vicious cycle of debt and extraction.
Instead of stabilising the macroeconomic environment, monetary tightening is weakening public finances and narrowing our growth prospects. We end up paying more, getting less, and falling further behind on the investments we need to grow the economy, create jobs, and reduce poverty.
Credit Policy Fiasco
Credit policy is the third lever of economic management, yet in Nigeria it is often treated as an afterthought. Even if government spending is restrained and inflation is managed, our economy cannot grow if credit does not reach people who produce, trade, farm, and build. Today, credit in Nigeria is scarce, expensive, and largely out of reach for those who actually create jobs.
Banks are operating in an environment of high uncertainty. Many businesses are struggling, balance sheets are weak, and policies change frequently. At the same time, government borrowing offers banks high returns with little risk.
Faced with this choice, banks naturally lend to the government instead of local businesses. For small and medium enterprises, startups, manufacturers, and farmers, access to finance has become the biggest obstacle to survival and growth.
Development finance institutions were meant to fill this gap, but they are simply too limited to carry the burden. Their funding is small, their processes are slow, and access is often uneven.
As a result, many productive Nigerians are locked out of credit altogether, leaving factories underused, farms underfinanced, and young businesses unable to scale. Without fixing how credit flows in our economy, growth will remain weak, no matter how tight fiscal or monetary policy becomes.
This credit drought has profound consequences. Investment falls. Productivity stagnates. Firms rely on internal funds or informal borrowing, which limits scale and resilience. Innovation slows. The economy becomes more consumption oriented and less capable of generating export earnings or technological progress. Without credit, even the most talented entrepreneurs cannot translate ideas into products. This is already happening.
What makes the situation particularly damaging is the way these three policy levers reinforce each other’s negative effects. Fiscal tightening reduces demand and profitability, making borrowers riskier.
Monetary tightening raises interest rates, further discouraging lending. Weak credit growth then undermines output and employment, reducing tax revenue and prompting calls for even more aggressive fiscal measures. This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable outcome of incoherent macroeconomic management.
Economic growth requires expectations of stability and opportunity. Investors, domestic and foreign, look not only at current conditions but at the direction of policy. When policies signal that the state will continue to extract more from a shrinking economy, maintain punitive interest rates, and allow credit to wither, rational investors stay away or adopt a wait and see posture. Capital formation slows. Human capital emigrates. Informality expands. The economy drifts.
None of this implies that discipline is unimportant or that inflation should be ignored. It implies that policy must be sequenced, balanced, and grounded in the realities of the economy. Growth is the foundation of sustainability. Without growth, fiscal consolidation fails, debt becomes unmanageable, and social pressures intensify.
What, then, must the Tinubu administration do now.
- First, it must reorient fiscal policy away from short term revenue extraction and toward growth enabling reform. This means moderating tax increases, improving tax administration rather than tax rates, and focusing on expanding the tax base through formalization and growth. Public spending must be reprioritized toward investments that raise productivity, such as power, transport, digital infrastructure, and human capital. Borrowing should be disciplined and transparently linked to projects with clear economic returns.
- Second, monetary policy must become more nuanced. Fighting inflation is essential, but it must be done with an understanding of its drivers. Interest rates should not be the only tool. Exchange rate stability, supply side interventions, and coordination with fiscal authorities are critical. A gradual and credible path toward lower interest rates, once inflation expectations stabilize, would signal commitment to growth and reduce pressure on both businesses and public finances.
- Third, credit policy must be actively reformed to unlock lending to the real economy. This requires strengthening development finance institutions, improving credit guarantees, reducing regulatory barriers that discourage productive lending, and aligning incentives so that banks find it attractive to finance businesses rather than simply fund government deficits. Access to credit for small and medium enterprises should be treated as a macroeconomic priority, not a peripheral concern.
- Finally, and most importantly, the administration must restore coherence. Fiscal, monetary, and credit policies must speak the same language and pursue the same objective. That objective should be sustainable growth that raises incomes, expands opportunity, and stabilizes the macroeconomy over time. Without this alignment, individual reforms will fail, no matter how well intentioned. The nation deserves the best economic minds to restore economic growth. The current economic team has failed.
In sum, what Nigerians are living through is not misfortune, nor an act of divine punishment as some sham religious charlatans would have people believe. It is the direct consequence of fiscal failure, monetary failure, and credit failure under officials who have proven wholly unequal to their offices. Keeping them in place is not caution or patience. It is a conscious choice of incompetence over talent. They must be removed now.
The choice before the Tinubu administration is no longer one of political survival. It is a choice between continued contraction dressed up as reform and a decisive realignment of fiscal, monetary, and credit policy toward growth, stability, and production. Economic recovery will not be achieved through slogans, announcements, or declared intentions. It requires clarity of purpose, technical competence, and disciplined coordination at the very top.
No amount of rhetoric or misinformation from Bayo Onanuga and Mohammed Idris will lower interest rates, reduce inflation, or ease the tax burden on businesses. APC slogans do not expand credit, and press releases cannot compensate for policies that actively suffocate production and investment.
Rather than devote energy to engineering defections from opposition parties, the president and the Nigerian people would be better served by addressing the real work of governing, stabilising the economy, and restoring public trust.
If President Tinubu is unwilling to change both his economic team and the direction of policy, then the burden of choice shifts to the Nigerian people. Democracies offer no guarantees of good leadership, only mechanisms for selection and removal.
When those entrusted with power refuse to correct failure, the burden is pushed onto citizens to endure its consequences. Nigerians must decide how much longer they are willing to pay that price. 2027 must be a referendum on Tinubu.
*About the Author
Nnaoke Ufere is a leading voice in African public thought and policy. He writes a weekly pinion column for the African Mind Journal, where his work shapes national conversations on leadership, governance, and reform. He is the author of Covenant With Nigerians: Reversing Our Country’s Decline. Nnaoke graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka with a first class honors degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering in 1981. A Harvard MBA alumnus and PhD holder in Strategic Management from Case Western Reserve University, Ufere is an influential author, public intellectual, and global development analyst whose insights on U.S.-Africa relations and institutional accountability continue to challenge the status quo and inspire change.
