The Presidency yesterday told former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to stop assessing President Bola Tinubu’s administration based on the economic realities of 2024, insisting that Nigeria’s reform programme has moved beyond its most difficult phase and is already producing measurable results.
In a detailed statement titled “Facts, Not Fear: A Point-by-Point Response to Atiku Abubakar on Nigeria’s Reform Journey,” Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, dismissed Atiku’s criticism of the administration’s economic policies as outdated and based on “frozen snapshots of history.”
According to Onanuga, while politics thrives on disagreement and democracy demands it, criticisms must be rooted in facts rather than historical snapshots that ignore subsequent developments.
Atiku had accused the Tinubu administration of fiscal recklessness, citing what he described as excessive borrowing in the 2024 budget, questioning the removal of fuel subsidy, criticising the administration’s tax reforms, alleging an unaccounted oil windfall of N7.98 trillion and suggesting that Nigeria was drifting economically.
Responding, the Presidency said the concerns deserved an answer “not because criticisms should be silenced, but because Nigerians deserve a fuller picture of where the country is today.”
Onanuga said it was curious that “in the middle of 2026, the opposition’s principal economic argument remains anchored to developments in the 2024 fiscal year.”
“Economic reforms are processes, not events,” he said, adding that judging the Tinubu administration solely by the painful adjustment period of 2024 was “like judging chemotherapy by the nausea it induces while ignoring the remission it seeks to achieve.”
The Presidency said the Nigerian economy that experienced painful adjustments in 2024 had evolved considerably.
It explained that after the exchange-rate reset, Nigeria’s dollar-denominated Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell to about $253 billion but has since recovered to approximately $377 billion, representing an increase of about 49 per cent from the post-adjustment trough.
Similarly, it said the country’s naira GDP had expanded from about N314 trillion in 2024 to around N530 trillion, a 69 per cent increase reflecting both higher economic activity and price changes.
While noting that the figures should continue to be assessed alongside real GDP growth, inflation and household welfare, the Presidency said they demonstrated that the economy had not remained frozen at its most difficult moment.
According to the statement, the reforms were never advertised as painless but were presented as necessary structural adjustments aimed at correcting long-standing distortions, including those created during the Obasanjo-Atiku administration between 1999 and 2007.
On borrowing, the Presidency argued that debt should not be viewed in isolation but alongside a country’s economic capacity.
It said the real issues were the size of the economy, revenue-generating capacity, debt-servicing costs, the purpose of borrowing and whether borrowed resources financed productive investments or recurrent consumption.
