If the late Chief Gani Oyesola Fawehinmi, the legendary human rights lawyer and Senior Advocate of the Masses, were alive today, he might look at Nigeria's budget crisis and see it plainly for what it is: theft. Organised, institutionalised, and dressed up in the polite language of governance and international finance, but theft nonetheless.
For decades, Nigeria's rulers have treated the national treasury as personal property to be divided among friends and contractors. President Tinubu's administration follows this well-worn path, though perhaps more brazenly than most.
In July 2024, Christian Ebeke, the International Monetary Fund's representative in Abuja, dropped a bombshell that went largely unnoticed. He said 2% of Nigeria's entire GDP simply vanishes from official budget documents.
Two percent of GDP isn't pocket change. It's hospitals that never get built, teachers left unpaid, roads that kill commuters, and children locked out of classrooms.
The government said nothing of consequence. The IMF's report wrapped the scandal in bland bureaucratic language, calling it "off-budget spending and complex financing instruments." But complex financing instruments are just how thieves describe the holes they cut in walls to move stolen goods.
Ordinary Nigerians don't need instruments to understand hunger. They know exactly what an empty pot means.
Then came the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation scandal. Senator Ahmed Wadada's committee uncovered N210 trillion in discrepancies between 2017 and 2023.
Let that number sink in. Two hundred and ten trillion naira.
That money could rebuild every failed road, resuscitate every collapsed hospital, and pay every owed pension in the federation many times over. Instead, it vanished into vague categories like "unsubstantiated accrued expenses" and mysterious receivables owed by nobody.
This isn't incompetence. Incompetence doesn't produce numbers this perfectly imprecise.
This is a machine built to convert oil wealth into private fortunes, with its architects genuinely shocked at how well it works. The system functions exactly as designed.
Here's the cruel irony. The same Senate that summoned NNPC chief Mele Kyari and threatened arrest warrants sits atop a chamber where oversight has become a marketplace.
According to the House director Ifeoma Ofili, agencies under investigation pay for lawmakers' flights and slip them envelopes.
Legislators divide the spoils among themselves while Nigerians starve. The investigators and the investigated are business partners, not opponents.
Fawehinmi would have exposed this hypocrisy without mercy. He understood that when a system becomes this corrupt, reform comes only through relentless exposure and public pressure.
Nigeria's transparency challenge isn't technical. It's moral.