TINUBU’S NUMBERS DON’T ADD UP. THEY NEVER DID. When a president rewrites the record systematically — always in the same direction — that is not spin. That is a governing philosophy. By Chidi Ekeh 

TINUBU’S NUMBERS DON’T ADD UP. THEY NEVER DID.

When a president rewrites the record systematically — always in the same direction — that is not spin. That is a governing philosophy. By Chidi Ekeh 

Let me tell you what the numbers say.

On a day in 2025, President Bola Tinubu stood before Nigerians and said this about the naira: “When I took over, it was N1,900 to a dollar.” He then offered the current rate as evidence of his administration’s achievement. The statement was confident. It was specific. And according to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s own historical data, it was false.

The naira was approximately ₦461 to the dollar at the official interbank rate when Tinubu was sworn in on 29 May 2023. The parallel market that day hovered around ₦750. The ₦1,900 figure he cited was not an inheritance. It was a consequence — a later market peak reached after his own administration removed the fuel subsidy, unified the exchange rate windows, and triggered the currency freefall that followed. He did not inherit a naira at ₦1,900. His policies helped produce one.

Then he cited it as the baseline from which he rescued us.

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This is not a piece about one misstatement. Every president misstates. Every political leader, under pressure, reaches for a number that flatters rather than a number that is true. That is the ordinary human condition of power, and it is not especially interesting.

What is interesting — what is, in fact, alarming — is the pattern. Over two years and across multiple high-profile addresses, President Tinubu’s factual errors have not been random. They have not cut in both directions. They have not occasionally overstated the crisis he inherited and occasionally understated the progress he has made. They run, with remarkable consistency, in a single direction: the inheritance is always worse than the record shows, and the achievement is always better.

That is not carelessness. That is architecture.

Take the foreign direct investment claim on Independence Day, 1 October 2024. The President told the nation that Nigeria had attracted more than $30 billion in foreign direct investment in the preceding year. It was a striking figure. It was the kind of number that signals transformation, that tells investors and Nigerians alike that the country has turned a corner.

The National Bureau of Statistics — his own government’s statistical agency — told a different story. TheCable’s fact-check, working from NBS capital importation data, found that actual FDI inflows between the second quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 amounted to approximately $448.95 million. Other fact-checkers reached similar conclusions. The $30 billion figure, it emerged, referred to investment pledges and commitments — the kind of numbers that get announced at summits and signed in MOUs and then very quietly never materialise into factory floors or job creation.

The gap between $448 million and $30 billion is not a rounding error. It is the distance between a country that is transforming and a country that is performing transformation for an audience. A president who cannot tell the difference — or who can, and chooses not to — has a problem that goes beyond communications.

The most technically sophisticated of these falsehoods concerns the N30 trillion ways-and-means debt. In the same Independence Day address, Tinubu told Nigerians that his government had “cleared” this debt — the accumulated advances the CBN had extended to the federal government under the previous administration, a practice so fiscally reckless that it contributed materially to the inflation Nigerians are still eating.

Cleared. Past tense. Done.

The Debt Management Office’s own documentation says otherwise. What happened to the N30 trillion is that it was securitised — converted from CBN overdraft advances into longer-term formal debt instruments now sitting in the federal government’s domestic debt stock. The liability did not disappear. It was reclassified. The debt moved from one column to another, and the president announced the relocation as a repayment.

I want to be careful here, because securitisation is not inherently dishonest as a fiscal tool. Converting short-term, high-risk central bank advances into longer-dated bonds with structured repayment schedules can be a legitimate debt management decision. The problem is not the instrument. The problem is calling it “clearance.” Clearance means paid. Securitisation means restructured. These are not synonyms. They produce very different implications for Nigeria’s debt burden, for the credibility of the country’s fiscal reporting, and for what Nigerians are entitled to understand about who owes what to whom.

And then there is the debt service-to-revenue ratio — the claim that has now appeared in multiple iterations across multiple addresses, each time wrong in a different way.

In his 29 May 2025 second-anniversary address, the President said Nigeria’s debt service-to-revenue ratio had dropped from nearly 100 percent in 2022 to under 40 percent by 2024. FactCheckHub examined the claim and found it did not hold. More pointedly, the CBN’s own January 2025 Economic Report showed federal government retained revenue of N483.47 billion against debt service of N696.27 billion for that month — implying a ratio of approximately 144 percent. Not under 40. Not nearly 40. One hundred and forty-four.

In his 1 October 2025 Independence Day address, the claim resurfaced in a slightly different form: that the ratio had dropped from 97 percent to below 50 percent. Africa Check, working with Guardian Nigeria and reviewing 18 economic claims from that speech, rated this incorrect. Budget Office of the Federation data showed the ratio was already around 64 percent at the start of the administration — not 97 percent. The dramatic fall requires a false starting point as much as it requires a false endpoint.

Here is the political logic, and it is not difficult to read: if you inherit a ratio of 64 percent and move it modestly in the right direction, that is a story about incremental improvement in difficult conditions. If you inherit a ratio of 97 percent and move it to below 50 percent, that is a story about national rescue. The numbers are different. The speeches are different. The country being described is different. Only the president is the same.

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And yet — and this is the part that makes this more than a ledger of grievances — some of what this administration has done has been genuinely hard and genuinely necessary.

The removal of the fuel subsidy, which Tinubu announced in his inaugural address, was a fiscal correction that economists across the political spectrum had urged for years. It was painful in ways that were immediate and visible and fell most heavily on Nigerians who could least absorb the blow. But it was not irrational. The Ways and Means securitisation, whatever one thinks of the framing, did address a real and pressing problem of unsustainable CBN financing. Oil production has recovered from the catastrophically low levels of 2022, even if not to the figures the President has claimed. Inflation, while still devastating to household purchasing power, has shown some deceleration from its peak.

A president who has done some genuinely difficult things should not need to lie about his numbers.

That is the question that sits in the middle of all of this and will not go away: if the real story is defensible, why is he telling a false one?

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The answer, I think, is this. Tinubu came to power on a promise of competence. Not ideology, not vision in the expansive sense, but technical mastery — the idea that here, finally, was a man who understood the machinery of the Nigerian economy and could operate it. His political identity is inseparable from his reputation as the man who built Lagos, who understood fiscal levers that his predecessors could not find. That reputation is both his greatest political asset and his most fragile one.

When the economy does not perform as promised — when inflation peaks at 34 percent, when the naira halves in value in his first year, when fuel queues return, when ordinary Nigerians report that they are worse off than they were under the administration he replaced — the competence narrative is under direct threat. The response, apparently, is not to revise the narrative. It is to revise the numbers.

The inheritance gets worse in the telling. The achievements get larger. The baselines shift. The columns reclassify.

And the gap between what the President says and what the record shows grows wider with each address.

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This matters beyond Tinubu. It matters because a president’s numbers are not just political rhetoric. They are the inputs into how the National Assembly appropriates money. They are the signals on which investors make decisions. They are the basis on which the CBN calibrates policy. They are what Nigerians use to decide whether the country is moving in a direction worth staying for.

When the numbers at the apex of the system are systematically false, governance does not just become dishonest. It becomes untethered from reality. And a government that has lost its connection to its own data cannot, in the end, be surprised when the data refuses to cooperate.

Nigeria’s real numbers are hard enough. They do not need to be made up.

Chidiebere Ekeh, a Public Affairs Analyst, writes from Abuja
chidodo11@gmail.com 19th April 2026

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