Months ago, I stumbled on a 15-second clip of a kindergartner leading what appeared to be a race at her school. Behind the phone camera was her father, cheering her on. “Go, Piper! Go, baby, go! Go! Go!” Bolstered by her father’s gingering, Piper raced past the finish line ahead of her peers and won the race.
But Piper likely didn’t know she had won and kept running. Her dad, now worried, began to scream, “Stop! Piper, stop! Baby, you won! You already won!” At the point the video ends, Piper was still running. Someone in the comments wrote hilariously, “Legend has it that she’s still running to this day.”
President Bola Tinubu appears determined to outdo his predecessors in every possible way. And he has done so in many categories: the good, the not-so-good and the awkward.
Take borrowing, for instance. While his predecessor, President Muhammadu Buhari, borrowed over N77tn in eight years, Tinubu has raced past that, borrowing N96tn in just two years.
Having outdone Buhari in a fraction of the time, the President, like Piper, probably doesn’t know he has won and is still running.
On Tuesday night, before a gathering of the somebodies of Plateau State at the State House, I’m talking all living former governors and the current governor, the Gbong Gwom Jos, Emir of Wase, the Chairman of CAN, among others, Tinubu dropped his latest album, and it was on borrowing.
He said, “If we have to borrow money, we will, because borrowing is not leprosy; we just have to work hard to be able to repay it.” I quite agree.
The President is right, technically. Borrowing is not leprosy. Nations borrow all the time, and prudent borrowing is a perfectly respectable instrument of government.
But the metaphor, like most political metaphors, conceals as much as it reveals. Because while borrowing may not be leprosy, it is also not 100 per cent perfect health. There is a third category between the two extremes. Call it the category of substances that look harmless until you realise you cannot stop using them.
When Buhari took office in May 2015, Nigeria’s total public debt stood at N12.06tn. By the time he completed his first three years in June 2018, it had risen to N22.4tn.
According to the Debt Management Office, Buhari left behind a national debt of at least N77tn on his last day in office. Some sources put it at N87.38tn.
When Tinubu took office, he inherited that N87.38tn. As of December 31, 2025, according to the latest figures from the Debt Management Office, released on April 15 this year, the country’s public debt stands at N159.28tn. That is a net new borrowing of approximately N72tn in just over two and a half years.
By the time the President clocks three years in office at the end of this month, the total will comfortably cross N167tn. That is, once we add the $6bn ($5bn from First Abu Dhabi Bank and $1bn from UK Export Finance) that the National Assembly approved on March 31.
In his first three years, Buhari borrowed over N10tn. In his first three years, Tinubu will have borrowed north of N80tn, about eight times what his predecessor did.
In real terms, even after adjusting for the naira, the gap is unmistakable. Spread that amount across the population, and every Nigerian, including children still in their mother’s womb, now carries about N724,000 in public debt.
Now, to be fair, the Tinubu administration deserves credit on a few specific debt indicators that the previous one could not match.
In April 2025, Nigeria fully repaid the $3.4bn Rapid Financing Instrument loan it had received from the IMF in 2020 at the height of COVID. Months ahead of schedule, Nigeria came off the Fund’s list of 91 indebted developing countries. The Presidency rightly raved about this at the time.
The debt service-to-revenue ratio, the gruesome figure that captures how much of every naira earned goes to creditors, has reportedly dropped from 97 per cent in the first half of 2023 to 68 per cent by the end of 2024, and to under 50 per cent by the second quarter of 2025, according to the National Orientation Agency.
The IMF projects Nigeria’s debt-to-GDP ratio at 32.3 per cent in 2026, down from 35.5 per cent in 2025, well below the West African convergence threshold of 70 per cent.
Customs collected N1.3tn in Q1 2025 alone, more than double the N600bn recorded in Q1 2023. And the National Revenue Service collected N22.59tn between January and September 2025.
The figure represented 120 per cent of the target for that nine-month period. It also achieved 90 per cent of the annual target of N25.2tn ahead of schedule.
These are not nothing. They reveal that fiscal discipline may have improved at the margins, even as the debt pile continues to rise. Both can be true.
But the Buhari years, and those before them, showed that Nigerians have a similar disdain whenever they hear that a president has requested to borrow again.
And Tinubu, ever one to tout it in public, said borrowing is not leprosy. It is the kind of statement Buhari wouldn’t have made. Not that he cared much about what Nigerians had to say about his borrowing. He just wouldn’t have seen the need to say it out loud.
I have written before about the strange tale of our two Baba Go Slows: the man who set the tempo, and the man who inherited it but somehow cannot resist outdoing his predecessor. I have also written about the moment, three weeks ago, when this President, in front of the Renewed Hope Ambassadors, declared, “The late Buhari is me. He was a partner. If I took over from him, is that not from myself?”
If we take that statement seriously, and we should, because words from the Villa carry weight, then the borrowing pattern starts to make sense. Perhaps the appetite for borrowing was never inherited after all. Maybe it was always there. And it may have been the prompting force moving Buhari to borrow, and borrow, and borrow.
If the borrowing “instigator” now has the stage to himself, should we expect any less? He has surpassed Buhari in less than half the time. We can expect that there will be more borrowing ahead.
Whatever the case, it is consoling to know that he plans to “work hard to be able to repay it.” We just hope the statement isn’t political.
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