This week, President Bola Tinubu set tongues wagging when he formally requested the approval of the National Assembly to secure a new wave of multi-currency loans amounting to approximately $23.5 billion, €2.265 billion, ¥15 billion, and N757.9 billion, as part of the country’s 2025-2026 external borrowing plan.

Already, a lot of citizens have expressed concerns that the country may be heading towards a debt trap, a situation in which its debt is difficult or impossible to repay, almost two decades after it achieved debt forgiveness from the Paris Club.

More worrying with this development is the fact that, at a time when the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) Governor, Olayemi Cardoso and his team are aggressively pursuing a tight monetary policy regime aimed at curbing inflation and stabilising the naira, the federal government’s push for fresh borrowing appears to contradict this policy direction. Such a move risks undermining the effectiveness of monetary tightening by injecting more liquidity into the economy through increased public spending, potentially fueling inflationary pressures, distorting market signals, and eroding investor confidence in the government’s fiscal discipline.

Precisely, the fresh proposed borrowing plan, spanning multiple international lenders and development institutions, marks one of the most ambitious external financing proposals of this administration to date and will certainly elevate the country’s existing debt stock.

As at December 31, 2024, Nigeria’s total public debt stood at N144.67 trillion, according to data from the Debt Management Office. This was a 48.58 per cent rise from the N97.34 trillion recorded by the country as at the end of 2023.

However, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr. Wale Edun, has dismissed widespread claims suggesting that the country plans to borrow $25 billion within one to two years, calling such impressions as totally erroneous and misleading. He explained that the actual borrowing plan for 2025 is $1.2 billion through the DMO and up to $2 billion via the multilateral borrowing programme. These, he said, are tied to specific projects and would be disbursed over time, not in a lump sum.

“The actual borrowing for each year is contained in the annual budget. In 2025, the external borrowing component is $1.23 billion, and it has not yet been drawn. This is planned for the second half of 2025. Also, the plan is for both the federal and several state governments across numerous geopolitical zones, including Abia, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Kaduna, Lagos, Niger, Oyo, Sokoto, and Yobe States.

“Importantly, it should be noted that the borrowing rolling plan does not equate to an automatic increase in the nation’s debt burden. The nature of the rolling plan means that borrowings are split over the period of the projects. For example, a large proportion of projects in the 2024 – 2026 rolling plan have multi-year draw downs of between five to seven years, which are project-tied loans,” the minister stated.

Despite Edun’s clarification, the general concern is that Nigeria’s debt profile has been rising at an alarming pace. While borrowing is not inherently bad, as many nations leverage debt to fund growth, what distinguishes Nigeria’s case is the absence of a clear, measurable impact over the years, which has heightened distrust between the citizens and public office holders.

Public trust is the currency of governance. When leaders borrow in the name of national development, the people expect transparency, accountability, and results. This erosion of public trust is multifaceted, stemming from a combination of perceived corruption, lack of transparency in governance, inconsistent policy implementation, and a general feeling among citizens that their welfare is not the primary focus of leadership.

When citizens witness vast sums being borrowed with little to show for it in terms of improved public services or economic opportunities, skepticism naturally takes root. The opaqueness surrounding how loans are secured, how funds are disbursed, and the accountability mechanisms in place further fuels this distrust.

For instance, a recent revelation by civic tech organisation, BudgIT Nigeria, that it uncovered over 11,000 projects worth N6.93 trillion inserted by the National Assembly in the 2025 budget underscores growing concerns about transparency and fiscal discipline.

BudgIT had described the development as a deeply entrenched culture of exploitation and abuse, led by top-ranking members of the National Assembly, which is another means of frittering borrowed public funds meant to support national development.

This lack of transparency creates a chasm between the government and the governed, making it increasingly difficult for authorities to garner public support for necessary, albeit sometimes painful, economic reforms.

Indeed, Nigeria is not the first nation to borrow, and won’t be the last. But what distinguishes successful economies is not the size of their debt, but the clarity of their vision and the trust of their people.

This, however, is the time for other civil society groups, just like BudgIT, and indeed the citizens, to wake up, stay vigilant, and demand full accountability from those in power. We must ask the right questions about public finance, scrutinise every line of the budget, and track every amount borrowed to support governance. If we fail to act now, these massive loans meant to improve lives as had been reported in the past, could quietly vanish into private pockets, fueling corruption instead of development.

By prioritising fiscal discipline, fostering transparency, and actively working to restore the faith of its citizens, Nigeria can unlock its immense potential and build a more prosperous and equitable future for its citizens.

In the absence of trust, even the most well-intentioned policies will be met with suspicion. Therefore, as the government considers another round of massive borrowing, it must also begin the hard work of rebuilding its trust deficit.

There is supposed to be a formidable coalition of powerful regional and national political forces working to upstage President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2027. But this coalition isn’t coalescing and appears to be crumbling before it has even had a chance to be formed. Three major reasons account for this.

The first reason is what I call the aspirational collision of the major movers of the coalition. By that, I mean the two major power blocs behind the coalition have irreconcilably divergent ideas about who should occupy the upper end of the ticket the coalition will produce.

PDP’s Atiku Abubakar basically wants a recreation of the 2019 electoral lineup. He would be the presidential candidate, and Labor Party’s Peter Obi would be the vice-presidential candidate. It is predicated on the assumption that Atiku Abubakar, by virtue of his primordial identity, will be a magnet for northern votes.

If he is the only prominent northern candidate in 2027, he will win both Muslim and Christian votes in the region, as northern Christians trust him more than any northern Muslim politician of his generation on account of his remarkable broadmindedness, though his close association with Nasir El-Rufai, widely regarded by many northern Christians as a crass, unremorseful Christophobe because of his past actions and utterances, undermines this appeal.

Peter Obi is supposed to bring the enthusiasm and votes he got from the 2023 presidential election to the coalition. However, it appears that although Peter Obi isn’t personally ill-disposed to being Atiku’s running mate again, his support base in the South would deplete considerably should he choose to play second fiddle to a northerner this time.

The dramatic rise in his political capital in 2023 was entirely the consequence of his being the only notable Southern Christian presidential candidate in the race. Plus, the prevalent sentiment in the South is that Muhammadu Buhari’s eight-year tenure was the North’s chance to rule. The next eight years from 2023 is the South’s turn.

If Obi were to accept being Atiku’s running mate, he would be seen by people in the South, including his native Southeast, as a betrayer, as a quisling, of the region. And that would mark the irretrievable diminution of his political capital.

Yet, it is unconstitutional for Atiku to be anybody’s running mate, having been a two-term vice president before. So, there is zero possibility of Atiku agreeing to be running mate to Obi, whom he brought to national limelight by choosing him as his running mate in 2019, against the recommendation of major players in the PDP at the time.

This is an unresolvable impasse. As much as the South justifiably thinks it is its turn to produce the president until 2031, the North has been unsuccessfully calling attention to the disadvantage it has suffered as a result of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s death, which prematurely returned power to the South for six years.

The Atiku group’s carrot to Obi—to accept being VP in exchange for Atiku serving only one term—is informed by this logic. It somehow compensates the North’s six-year loss and promises a return of power to the Southeast, which has never produced a president (or even a vice president) since the start of the Fourth Republic.

Nevertheless, if the chatter I see on social media is any guide, Obi’s support base is unpersuaded by this. Were Obi to accept being a running mate to Atiku in 2027, many Obi supporters say they would rather sit out the election or, worse, vote for Tinubu to ensure that the presidency remains in the South.

This is complicated by the reality that, were Atiku to stay out of the 2027 presidential contest and endorse Obi, it’s unlikely to improve Obi’s electoral fortunes in parts of the North that rejected him in 2023.

The second reason the coalition is unlikely to succeed is that key northern politicians who are already positioning themselves to be Tinubu’s successor in 2031 are either not part of it or are in it to undercut it from within. There are two reasons for this.

First, an Atiku presidency would mean their aspirations to be president would be deferred by more years than a Tinubu second term. Plus, even if Atiku honors his alleged pledge to serve for only one term (which is never a guarantee, given the intoxication of power), he would hand over power to the South. That counts them out.

Second, opposing Tinubu’s second term by joining a coalition would ensure that they take themselves out of consideration for Tinubu’s support in 2031. It is self-seeking political calculation that assumes the nature and form of the outlines of the future.

The third reason the coalition would have trouble taking off is Tinubu’s own determined, single-minded, well-oiled—even state-sanctioned—effort to destroy it. I’ll only talk about one effort because, while many people may be aware of it, only a few seem to be conscious of it.

Tinubu is deploying a political propaganda tactic called the bandwagon technique. This method encourages people to act or think a certain way because “everyone else is doing it.” It appeals to the human desire to be part of the majority or to avoid being left out.

It’s a powerful technique because it leverages social pressure and the fear of missing out (FOMO). The unceasing gale of political defections of prominent political actors across the country is intended to cause Tinubu’s opponents to question their judgement and give up their opposition to him.

Even Afrobeats music icon Davido—who won well-deserved plaudits and brownie points from Igbo people a few days ago for telling a Yoruba Twitter interlocutor who questioned his outward symbolic associations with Igbo that he is “Igbo by blood”—appears to be part of this bandwagon technique.

Video records of him visiting Tinubu in the Presidential Villa and introducing well-known Igbo entertainment figures as “APC members” fit the bandwagon method perfectly. Here’s a man whom the president’s media team had tackled vigorously for his criticism of Tinubu’s government, whose uncle is a PDP governor, and who publicly identifies with the Igbo (a core stronghold of opposition to Tinubu), now openly identifying with the president at the same time that major political players in opposition parties are switching to APC. That’s unlikely to be random.

When you add this to the predominant sentiment in Nigeria that incumbents don’t lose elections, even if they actually lose them (with the exception of Goodluck Jonathan), you are looking at a systematic, coordinated effort to construct the rhetoric of inevitability around Tinubu’s second term.

A coalition of politicians who don’t offer or promise anything different from Tinubu and who have irreconcilable asymmetries in their expectations of what the coalition should produce will have a hard time overcoming Tinubu’s strategies.

This is sad because, as I previously pointed out, the conditions in the country should preclude Tinubu from even being considered for a second term. A May 24, 2025, special report I read in Vanguard by Dr. Dele Sobowale titled “Tinubu at Midterm: Who are the People Gov’t is Satisfying?” was particularly striking.

Sobowale's Consultancy conducted a nationwide survey to assess public perception of the federal government's performance. The study involved a brief verbal questionnaire posed to Nigerians across all six geopolitical zones, cutting across age, ethnicity, religion, gender, and income levels.

Participants were asked two simple yes-or-no questions: whether their lives were better now compared to two years ago, and whether they expected things to improve in the next two years.

The findings were stark. Only 3 percent of respondents said their lives had improved, while an overwhelming 97 percent said they had not. Even more striking was the pessimism about the future: just 1 percent expressed hope for improvement in the next two years, while 99 percent did not.

These results reflect a deep sense of dissatisfaction and growing despair among the Nigerian populace. In a normal setting, no government that has enabled this much misery index and that is burdened by this heavy perceptual burden should even run for a second term. But this is Nigeria.

Yesterday’s light-hearted post about African English pronunciations using the example of how Nigerians, Kenyans, and Ghanaians say the word “work” sparked a spirited conversation about the supposed “correct” way to pronounce English words.

With my 8-year-old daughter, Ramat, during the last ed-el-fitr celebration

After reading through the comments, I’ve concluded that many, perhaps most, Nigerians have been conditioned (brainwashed might be the better word) by Ghanaian teachers who came to Nigeria in large numbers during the 1970s and 1980s to teach in primary and secondary schools.

 These teachers, whether consciously or not, often instilled the idea that Nigerian pronunciations were “wrong” or inferior to Ghanaian ones. That belief is deeply flawed.

Let’s begin with a fundamental truth: there is no universally “correct” or “incorrect” pronunciation in English. 

 Within England alone, pronunciation varies dramatically from region to region. The same holds true for the United States and every other native-English-speaking country.

 Every speech community adapts pronunciation to its own linguistic environment and sociocultural peculiarities.

Second, I’ve interacted with native English speakers from different countries for over two decades now, and I can confidently say that Ghanaian English pronunciation isn’t inherently closer to native English accents than Nigerian pronunciation is.

 Ghanaian English sounds Ghanaian. Nigerian English sounds Nigerian. That’s all there is to it.

It’s true that dictionaries provide phonetic transcriptions of words, and those who learn English formally often mistake these transcriptions for definitive pronunciation standards. 

But dictionaries merely offer approximations—often based on a narrow sliver of upper-class native speakers. 

The situation becomes even more complex when you consider the wide variation within native English dialects. What dictionaries present as “standard” is usually just the speech of society’s elites who are, ironically, a small minority even in their own countries.

Standard English pronunciation is not synonymous with the “correct” English pronunciation, just as non-standard varieties aren’t “incorrect.”

For example, take Received Pronunciation (RP), often called the King’s (or Queen’s) English or BBC English. Only about 2 to 3 percent of people in England speak with an RP accent. Some estimates stretch that to 5 or 10 percent, but even then, over 90 percent of Britons don’t speak RP. 

So, to call it the only “correct” accent simply because it’s represented in UK dictionaries or on broadcast media is to erase and belittle the speech patterns of the vast majority of English speakers in Britain.

In the United States, the General American (GenAm) accent is more widely used than RP is in the UK, with estimates suggesting that about 40 to 50 percent of Americans speak a variant of it.

Still, the U.S. is teeming with other recognizable accents: Southern, Bostonian, New York, Appalachian, Cajun, and many more.

This is precisely why pronunciation doesn’t factor into what is formally defined as Standard English. 

That said, I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t strive to pronounce words in ways that make you intelligible to the widest audience possible. Communicative clarity matters.

But let’s be honest: most English speakers around the world don’t pronounce work as “wek,” nurse as “nes,” or pastor as “pasta,” as Ghanaians do. 

In fact, calling a pastor “pasta” might earn you accusations of harboring cannibalistic fantasies. We eat pasta. Pastors preach the gospel. Big difference!

Amusingly, a few hours ago, when I asked my 8-year-old daughter (who has never traveled outside the United States) which of “wok,” “wak,” or “wek” sounded most like work, she picked “wok” without the slightest hesitation.

 I swear, she even echoed what our American “referee” said during a similar conversation more than 20 years ago: that “wak” reminds her of whack—as in, to hit someone!

If you listen carefully to English spoken across Anglophone Africa, you'll notice three unmistakable "accent capitals": Nigerian, Kenyan, and Ghanaian. 

All other regional accents tend to branch out as derivatives or close relatives of this linguistic trinity. And nothing illustrates these fascinating differences quite like the word "work."

In Nigeria, it is pronounced emphatically as "wok," with the "o" booming proudly like the first sound in "all." Nigerians will tell you they’re off to "wok" with seriousness befitting an epic quest. 

Over in Kenya, however, the word undergoes a curious transformation into "wak," perilously close to "whack," as though every job involves a bit of spirited combat. 

And then in Ghana, our little stubborn brother, the pronunciation elegantly morphs into "wek," cheerfully rhyming with "check." 

Back in June 2003, these accent disparities sparked an unforgettable showdown between me and my Kenyan journalist friend, Douglas Kimani, during our days together in the United States. 

Douglas cheekily declared that Nigerians were burdened with the absolute worst English accent on the African continent. To drive home his point, he challenged me, saying, "Pronounce 'work' for me."

"Wok," I said, with Nigerian flair. Douglas erupted into uncontrollable laughter, nearly toppling over. "You mean 'wak,' my friend!" he retorted confidently.

This was too much. I responded by doubling over in hysterical laughter myself. Offended yet amused, Douglas insisted we settle this pronunciational dispute fairly. 

We approached an unsuspecting American lady, explained our accents, spelled the word for clarity, and then performed our distinct pronunciations. "Who’s closer to your own pronunciation?" Douglas asked, triumphantly certain of victory.

Without hesitation, our American "referee" sided with me. She gently explained to Douglas that "wak" would sound to an American like "whack," meaning either to hit forcefully or, if spelled "wack," something bizarre or totally uncool. 

Douglas’s expression was priceless. It was a cocktail of disbelief, mock outrage, and good-humored defeat.

From that day on, our banter took a hilarious turn. Each time I saw Douglas, I’d tease, "So, my friend, how is wak in Kenya today?" and he would gamely respond in a wildly exaggerated Nigerian accent, "Ah, wok is perfectly fine o!"

Lately, whenever I recall our playful linguistic duels, my thoughts drift amusingly to Rihanna's global hit, "Work." 

Imagine if Rihanna had adopted the Kenyan pronunciation, singing passionately, "Wak, wak, wak, wak, wak, wak!" Her song would have transformed instantly into an anthem fit for a flock of quacking ducks!

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time I got back to "wok." Or should I say "wak"…or "wek"?