Nigeria’s Tinubu Shows Economic Gains, but Relief Eludes

Two Nigerias are visible in the numbers released this week. In one, the federal government’s books are healing: Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele told a press conference in Abuja that subsidy removal and naira liberalisation generated ₦15.8 trillion for the Federation between June 2023 and December 2025. In the other Nigeria, the one households actually live in, the government’s own statisticians recorded food inflation accelerating for a sixth straight month. The gap between these two accounts is not a communications problem. It is the substance of the story.

Presenting what officials called “The Benefits, Costs and Harm Prevented” scorecard, Oyedele broke down where the reform windfall went: ₦5.4 trillion to the Federal Government and ₦10.4 trillion to states and local governments through FAAC, alongside ₦3.1 trillion in incremental independent revenue and ₦11.9 trillion in additional borrowing, taking the Federal Government’s total incremental resources to ₦20.4 trillion. Set against that, the minister disclosed federal incremental expenditure of ₦30.64 trillion — a ten-trillion-naira gap between what reform generated and what government spent.

That admission, delivered by the minister himself, cuts against the triumphant framing of the scorecard. Wage adjustments and the expanded minimum wage consumed ₦9.39 trillion of federal spending — more than the Federal Government’s entire ₦5.4 trillion share of the subsidy-related resources — while external debt servicing absorbed a further ₦9.37 trillion and infrastructure took ₦6.5 trillion. Oyedele’s own counterfactual argument is that without the reforms, at least 30 states would by now be struggling to pay salaries — a claim that rests on modelled projections rather than observed outcomes.

Meanwhile, the inflation data households actually experience is moving the other way. Food inflation climbed to 20.31 percent year-on-year in July, its highest level since September 2025, even as headline inflation eased to 15.43 percent. That divergence — cooling headline numbers alongside surging food costs — is the clearest statistical expression of the recovery-versus-relief problem: macroeconomic stabilisation and household financial distress can, and currently do, coexist.

Food took a sharper bite for the sixth consecutive month. NBS attributed July’s spike to price movements in crayfish, fresh pepper, onions, rice, garri, plantain, beef and eggs — the staples of an ordinary household budget, not a luxury basket distorted by imported goods. For a family already stretched, that is not an abstract statistic; it is a smaller plate.

Faced with that pressure, demand for household credit has strengthened. Central Bank data shows personal loans rose to ₦1.96 trillion in January 2026, now accounting for more than half of all consumer credit, with growth driven entirely by personal lending rather than retail or business credit.

The CBN’s Q2 2026 Credit Conditions Survey recorded consumer loan demand from households rising to 11.2 index points and demand for unsecured personal loans and overdrafts climbing to 7.9 index points, even as lenders reported improving repayment performance. The figures indicate that credit is becoming an increasingly important part of household financial management, although the data do not establish why individual borrowers took out the loans.

That gap is structural, not incidental. The national minimum wage has stood at ₦70,000 a month — roughly $42 — since 2024, and even Lagos’s higher ₦85,000 minimum falls far short of an estimated ₦180,000 monthly living wage for the city.

Even the presidency appears to concede the wage has not kept pace. Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila told a governance summit in June that the ₦70,000 wage, though a milestone in 2024, “must be honestly reassessed against today’s realities” — an unusually direct acknowledgment, from inside government, of the exact tension this scorecard otherwise elides.

None of this invalidates the government’s fiscal case. Oyedele’s numbers on subsidy savings and Federation Account allocations are independently verifiable and, on their own terms, real. But a stronger federal balance sheet is not the same instrument as a stronger household balance sheet, and the data on food prices, borrowing and wage inadequacy suggest the second has not yet arrived. Whether Nigeria’s macroeconomic recovery eventually becomes financial relief for the households funding it — through food, rent, fuel and school fees — remains the open question the scorecard does not answer.