Nigeria is being sold by the pound, and the auctioneer sits smugly in Aso Rock. Since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu assumed office in May 2023, Nigeria has plunged headlong into an abyss of debt. A staggering $7.2 billion in external loans have already been secured; all from the World Bank. Now, with shocking audacity, President Tinubu is asking for another $21.5 billion, alongside ₦758 billion in domestic bonds to settle pension arrears that his administration should never have allowed to accumulate in the first place. This reckless borrowing is not governance; it is generational sabotage dressed in the garb of policy. Let it be clear: this is not economic strategy. It is fiscal vandalism.
Tinubu, like a drunken sailor on a spree of debt-fueled delusion, is mortgaging Nigeria’s unborn generations for temporary optics. This isn’t investment; it is enslavement. What legacy will he leave behind but a blood-soaked ledger and the echo of unborn children wailing under the burden of debts they never incurred?
How does a nation with such abundant human and natural resources reduce itself to a glorified loan application center? From $750 million for the power sector to $800 million for “social safety nets,” from $1.57 billion for health and education to a laughable $632 million for “nutrition” – each loan is announced with polished press releases but no credible outcomes. Power supply is still erratic. Education is still crumbling. The health sector is a graveyard of unfulfilled promises. And our women and adolescent girls? Still left behind in the cold shadow of broken commitments.
This is not just about money. It is about morality. It is about justice. It is about betrayal. And what of the National Assembly? That hallowed chamber of supposed oversight has become a rubber stamp of national ruination. In the face of such staggering requests—$21.5 billion in fresh loans, €2.2 billion, ¥15 billion in Japanese yen, ₦758 billion in pension bonds—the legislature acts not as a check on executive excess but as its echo chamber. They do not scrutinize; they submit. They do not debate; they endorse. They have traded their constitutional duty for proximity to power. Their silence is not just complicity—it is treasonous.
And so, the debt deepens. Under Tinubu, the Nigerian state is being auctioned off, not to the highest bidder, but to the cruel whims of international lenders whose interest rates will become shackles on our children’s necks. The president’s continued insistence that these loans will “stimulate the economy” is a cruel joke—an insult to the intelligence of a nation whose economy continues to shrink even as its debt balloons. We ask: where is the vision? Where is the strategy? Where is the plan for revenue generation that does not involve kneeling before foreign creditors?
There is none. Only the bleak rhythm of borrowing, borrowing, and borrowing—like a compulsive gambler mortgaging his family’s home to play one more hand. History will not forget this. Nigerians must not forgive it. To the Tinubu administration: your name shall be etched not in gold but in debt, in the lamentations of unborn generations and in the rusting ruins of a country that once dared to hope.
And to the National Assembly: your cowardice will be remembered as the applause that greeted Nigeria’s financial funeral. You were elected to be sentinels—not sycophants.
It is time for the Nigerian people to rise in one voice and say: Enough. We will not watch in silence as our future is bartered, our dignity eroded, and our children condemned to pay the interest on your failure.
Nigeria is not for sale. Not by Tinubu. Not by his cabinet. Not by any assembly blinded by power and dulled by greed. Let this editorial stand as a witness. History will judge. But we are judging now. And our verdict is damning.
