Mark Twain, the American writer and humourist, famously said: “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics.” This aphorism is truer in Nigeria than in virtually any other country. Put bluntly, one must be utterly gullible to believe official statistics in Nigeria. The unreliability of official data in Nigeria is known universally, with international bodies like the IMF and the World Bank frequently questioning the credibility of Nigeria’s official statistics. For decades, the problem was blamed on lack of capacity and technical competence, but now it’s also associated with political interference.
A few years ago, it was alleged, albeit denied, that the Buhari government tried to pressure the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, to falsify economic data to downplay its economic failure. But Buhari’s successor, Bola Tinubu, harbours far more acute political sensitivity about economic data because he’s desperate to show that his painful economic reforms are working. Furthermore, Tinubu has stronger control and firmer influence over the supposedly independent state institutions. With the president’s tendency to make unrealistic promises and to brag about their “fulfilment”, political interference with official statistics, coupled with officials’ eagerness to impress him, is not far-fetched. That’s how to view official statistics about Nigeria’s economy in 2025. Call it statistical fallacies!
Our starting point must be the 2025 budget to which the Nigerian economy was officially moored. President Tinubu dubbed it “The Budget of Restoration: Securing peace and rebuilding prosperity.” But despite Tinubu’s attempt to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind, apologies to George Orwell, by trumpeting the budget’s “success”, it’s undeniable that it failed woefully in the core missions it set itself. “Securing peace”? By December 2025, Nigeria was more insecure than it was in December 2024, so much so that the US President, Donald Trump, unilaterally launched military strikes against terrorist camps inside the country. “Rebuilding prosperity”? Nigerians entered 2026 as poor as, if not poorer than, they entered 2025. Responding to the budget, I wrote a piece titled, “2025 Budget: Tinubu dangles false hopes before Nigerians again!” (Vanguard, December 27, 2024). I take nothing back: the N49.7 trillion budget, later increased to N54.2 trillion by the National Assembly, restored nothing, secured no peace and rebuilt no prosperity, certainly not for ordinary Nigerians.
But my focus here is not the broad aspirations of the budget; rather, it’s its specific projections. In the 2025 budget, Tinubu said, among other things, that his administration was targeting N34.82 trillion in revenue to fund the budget; that inflation would drop from 34.6 per cent to 15 per cent, and that exchange rate would improve from approximately N1,700 per dollar to N1,500. Given the parlous state of the economy in 2024, it was clear that these projections needed a miracle to be realised or that, somehow, the government would need to massage the numbers to give the impression that the projections were achieved and thus whitewash the unpleasant economic reality. So, what happened?
Well, let’s start with the revenue projection. In September last year, Tinubu told a group called The Buhari Organisation, which visited him at Aso Rock: “Today, I stand here before you to brag: Nigeria is not borrowing. We have met our revenue target for the year, and we met it in August.” Wow, what a miracle! What an achievement! Except that it was neither. For two months later, in November, Tinubu asked the National Assembly to approve a new N1.15 trillion domestic loan to fund the 2025 budget deficit, which the legislators supinely did within days. The Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, later disclosed that the government missed its 2025 revenue target by N30 trillion, saying that while the government had projected N40.8 trillion in revenue to fund the 2025 budget, “the current trajectory indicates that federal revenues for the full year will likely end at around N10.7 trillion.” Indeed, so low were revenue inflows that the government rolled capital projects from 2024 and 2025 budgets into the 2026 budget. So, what happened to Tinubu’s self-proclaimed bragging rights?
Let’s turn to the second projection: the exchange rate. President Tinubu said it would fall from N1,700 per dollar to N1,500. Last December, the exchange rate was N1,429 per dollar. Admittedly, that was an achievement. However, with revenue shortfall so acute, with FDI inflows stuck at 0.42 per cent and with debt totalling N54.7 trillion in three years, the government can’t take credit for modest appreciation in naira’s value. What’s more, the naira’s value modestly increased partly because the dollar has been plummeting since President Trump returned to power, thanks to some of his policies, such as the trade war. The dollar slumped 9.6 per cent against a basket of leading currencies in 2025. As the dollar’s value falls, that of other currencies would rise relative to it. So, put simply, the naira is marginally benefitting from a weak dollar! Call it a miracle, if you like!
But what about inflation? According to the NBS, it dropped to 14.45 per cent in November 2025. It was 34.6 per cent in December 2024 when President Tinubu promised it would fall to 15 per cent by December 2025. Was Tinubu right or did the NBS paint an artificially rosy picture? The latter is truer because there’s a disconnect between the data and how the economy feels. Truth is, the NBS under the leadership of Adeyemi Adeniran, the statistician-general, has not covered itself in glory. In 2023, the NBS claimed that Nigeria’s unemployment rate dropped, overnight, from 33.3 per cent to 4.1 per cent simply by changing the methodology. Yet, the extreme poverty rate is as high as 50 per cent, while, at $1,084, Nigeria has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world. But here’s another disconnect: if unemployment is around 3 per cent and inflation is now 12.45 per cent, according to the NBS, why is the interest rate still so high at 27 per cent? After all, inflation coming down creates space for interest rate cuts, which would be catalysing from the perspective of business investment.
Truth be told, the NBS, which has not published unemployment data for 14 months, has a huge credibility problem. Sadly, that’s the verdict of the World Bank and the IMF. For instance, in March last year, the World Bank expressed concern over Nigeria’s data quality. The IMF was even more damning in its 2025 Article IV Consultation report, saying that economic data in Nigeria are “low-quality and unreliable”. The IMF ranks countries’ statistical quality on a point scale of A-D. But it ranked Nigeria “C” on GDP and inflation data and “D” on government finance statistics. As the IMF put it, “risks to the success of the IMF’s engagement with Nigeria are substantial” because of “low-quality data”. With such appalling global rankings, coupled with the extremely closed political system where every organ of the state is opaque and servile, who will trust official economic data in Nigeria?
In January 2025, I wrote a New Year’s piece titled “Tinubu squandered 2024; sadly, he’s set to waste 2025 too!” (Vanguard, January 2, 2025). Notwithstanding the dodgy statistics, my verdict is that 2025 was wasted, throwing more Nigerians into deeper poverty and misery. But what about 2026, with the N58.18 trillion budget? Well, being a pre-election year, expect loads of money to go around and lots of statistics too. It’s a trickle-down year when some poor will eat crumbs from the politicians’ table, while the cacophony and awful din of politics will temporarily drown people’s sorrow. Welcome to 2026, a year of noise without substance!
The post Dodgy data: The fallacies about Nigeria’s economy in 2025, by Olu Fasan appeared first on Time.i.ng.
