President Bola Tinubu on Tuesday disclosed that the Federal Government had surpassed its revenue target projections in the 2025 budget by August based on improved revenue accruals from the non-oil sector
Tinubu, who made this disclosure during a meeting with members of the Buhari Organisation, led by former Nasarawa State Governor, Senator Tanko Al-Makura, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, explained that based on the fiscal scorecard, the government was no longer borrowing from domestic banks.
He said: “The economy is stabilised, nobody is trading piece of paper for exchange rate anymore. We are going up. Today I’m standing before you, I can brag that Nigeria is not borrowing a dime from local banks.
“The revenue, we have met our target of revenue for the whole year, we’ve met it in August. Non-oil. If non-oil revenue is doing well, then we have no fear of whatever Trump is doing on the other side” , the President added.
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The President also hinted about the administration’s nationwide agricultural mechanization initiative aimed at achieving food security and reducing poverty.
He explained: “I’ve just signed up on a huge mechanization program that in every region, we have a mechanized center for agric-mechanization. That is our path to food sovereignty, food security. You remove hunger from poverty, you have defeated poverty.”
Despite the President’s optimism, Nigeria’s debt profile has continued to surge, raising concerns about the government’s capacity to achieve the desired debt-to-GDP ratio that can assure sustainable growth of the economy
Data from the Debt Management Office (DMO) indicated that Nigeria’s total public debt stock stood at N149.39 trillion as of March 31, 2025, representing 22.8% increase from N121.67 trillion recorded in the same period of 2024, and by N4.72 trillion from the preceding quarter’s debt profile.
As the government continues with the issuance of debt insturments on a monthly basis, analysts believe that despite the DMO’s assurance that the nation’s debt remained within the specified global benchmark, the fiscal deficit in this year’s budget could expand to 5.8% of GDP, surpassing the 3.9%.projected in the approved budget.
For instance, a mid-year Economic Outlook report from CSL Stockbrokers Limited, a subsidiary of FCMB Group Plc, projected that Nigeria’s public debt could surge to N160.6 trillion by the end of the 2025 fiscal year.
