IMF, President Tinubu and the transparency challenge

By Moshood Oshunfurewa

If we are to reincarnate the late Chief Gani Oyesola Fawehinmi (1938–2009), a legendary Nigerian human rights lawyer, publisher, author, social critic, and Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM), on the current budget imbroglio, 2% of GDP, and Gbaja/Adeyemi scandal, I might not mistake his line of words as thus: “Let us call this what it is. Not ‘fiscal opacity.’ Not ‘off-budget spending.’ Not the polite, bloodless language of the International Monetary Fund. What is happening in Nigeria under Bola Ahmed Tinubu is theft — organized, institutionalized, defended-in-law theft of the commonwealth, executed by a ruling class that has learned to dress looting in the language of governance.”

I have watched this country’s rulers, one administration after another, treat the national treasury as a family inheritance to be shared among friends, contractors, and cronies while telling the ordinary Nigerian to “manage.” Tinubu’s government is no exception. It may, in fact, be the fullest flowering of a rot that decades of civilian rule have allowed to fester.

Two percent of GDP: a number that should provoke riots

When the IMF’s man in Abuja, Christian Ebeke, casually mentioned in July 2026 that something like 2% of Nigeria’s entire GDP in public spending simply does not appear in official budget documents, the country’s political class received it as a technical footnote. It should have been received as a declaration of war on the Nigerian people. Two percent of GDP is not small change — it is hospitals unbuilt, teachers unpaid, roads that kill commuters, and children who will never see a classroom. It is the difference between a nation that can feed its people and one that cannot.

And what did the government say? Nothing worth repeating. The IMF’s Article IV report spoke gently of “off-budget spending and complex financing instruments.” Complex financing instruments! This is the language the thief uses to describe the hole in the wall he built to move stolen goods. The masses do not need instruments to understand hunger. They understand exactly what an empty pot means.

N210 trillion: a figure designed to numb the mind

Then comes the NNPC affair — N210 trillion in discrepancies between 2017 and 2023, unearthed by the Senate Committee on Public Accounts under Ahmed Wadada. Let that number sit. Two hundred and ten trillion naira. Enough to rebuild every failed road, resuscitate every collapsed hospital, and pay every owed pension in this federation many times over — vanished into “unsubstantiated accrued expenses” and “receivables” owed by nobody in particular.

This is not incompetence. Incompetence does not produce numbers this precise in their imprecision. This is a system functioning exactly as its architects designed it: a machine for converting the nation’s oil wealth into private fortune while the mechanics who built the machine call press conferences to express shock at how well it works.

And here is the bitter joke that Gani Fawehinmi would have exposed with his characteristic scorn: the same Senate summoning Mele Kyari and threatening arrest warrants sits atop a chamber where, by the testimony of the House’s own director, Ifeoma Ofili, oversight has become a marketplace. Agencies under investigation pay for the lawmakers’ flights. Agencies under investigation hand lawmakers envelopes. Agencies under investigation script the very findings meant to indict them. Legislators, we are told, fight each other over the spoils while the clerks who do the real work go home empty-handed.

This is not oversight. This is extortion wearing a constitutional robe. The National Assembly, which the masses fund with their taxes to watch over their money, has instead become another till to rob from. When the guard and the thief share the same pocket, who then guards the people?

The highway of hitches and handshakes

Consider the N15.6 trillion Lagos–Calabar coastal highway, handed to a company owned by Gilbert Chagoury, a man Tinubu himself has called “valued and treasured.” No competitive bidding, though the law demands it. A price of roughly N4 billion per kilometre, nearly double the World Bank’s benchmark for comparable roads elsewhere. A project that began as private capital seeking tolls and, the moment the private financier claimed hardship, transformed overnight into a public trillion-naira burden shifted onto the shoulders of ordinary taxpayers.

This is the pattern, again and again: privatize the profit, socialize the loss, and personalize the contract. It is not new. It is the oldest trick of comprador capitalism in the Nigerian state — friends of power eat first, the public purse absorbs the risk, and the working masses inherit potholes, tolls, and debt.

Laws that exist only to be broken

The tragedy is not that Nigeria lacks laws. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2007 demands transparency. The Public Procurement Act demands competition. These are not weak instruments — they are strong laws rendered toothless by a ruling class that treats compliance as optional and enforcement as an insult to their sovereignty over the treasury. Scholars have documented plainly that these statutes are honoured as formality, not obligation.

This tells the masses something important: Nigeria’s crisis has never truly been a crisis of law. It is a crisis of who holds power and whom that power serves. The Open Budget Survey’s numbers confirm the trajectory — transparency scores climbing to 45 in 2021, only to collapse to 31 by 2023, with public participation falling even further. A government can pass every reform the IMF applauds and still be sliding backward on the one metric that matters most to the people: can citizens see, question, and control how their money is spent? The answer, unmistakably, is no.

Military boots versus democratic gloves

Let us not romanticize the past to condemn the present. Sani Abacha’s junta looted $3–5 billion with no press, no parliament, no pretense — naked robbery under military boots. 

But what exists now may be more dangerous, not less. Today’s looting wears the gloves of democracy. It hides behind Senate probes that recover nothing, procurement laws that bind no one, and a Freedom of Information Act that informs no one. The masses are given the theatre of accountability — hearings, headlines, summoned executives — while the money disappears exactly as it did under the generals, only now with a democratic alibi.

This is worse, because it corrupts the very idea of democratic governance in the minds of ordinary people. When probes never recover a naira, when transparency portals glitch and stall, when Budget Implementation Reports simply stop being published — as they have since mid-2024 — the masses learn to expect nothing from their institutions. That cynicism is itself a victory for the looting class. A demobilized, disillusioned citizenry does not organize, does not demand, does not resist.

What must be said plainly

Tinubu’s exchange-rate unification and subsidy removal earned applause from Washington and London. But reform that squeezes the poor at the fuel pump while trillions vanish unaccounted for is not reform — it is redistribution upward, dressed in technocratic virtue. You cannot ask nurses, teachers, and market women to tighten belts already cut to the bone while N210 trillion cannot be traced and multi-trillion-naira roads are handed to friends without a single competing bid.

The task before the Nigerian masses is not to wait for the IMF, the Senate, or the executive to police themselves. History — from Abacha to Obasanjo to Buhari to Tinubu — teaches that the ruling class does not discipline itself. Accountability has always been forced from below: by workers, students, civil society, and a press willing to name names. The Fiscal Responsibility Act and the Procurement Act are not dead letters because they are badly written; they are dead letters because those with the power to enforce them profit from their silence.

Until organized labour, civil society, and an awakened citizenry make the cost of impunity higher than the reward of theft, Nigeria’s budget will remain what it has always been under this class of rulers: not an instrument of the people’s welfare, but a weapon turned against them.

•Oshunfurewa writes from Lagos.

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