Those who speak glibly about deficits, debt and fiscal expansion often reveal not economic sophistication, but economic illiteracy disguised as moral outrage. Much of today’s opposition rhetoric confuses accounting identities with ideological slogans and mistakes macroeconomic intervention for recklessness.
A modern economy is not managed through market romanticism. It is managed through theory, evidence, history and context. The loudest critics of the Tinubu administration speak as though government borrowing is inherently immoral, as though deficits emerge from vice rather than economic necessity, and as though Nigeria’s economic difficulties suddenly materialized on 29 May 2023. Such arguments are neither historically grounded nor economically coherent.
No serious economist — from Keynes to Samuelson, from Krugman to Stiglitz — has argued that governments should retreat into fiscal paralysis during periods of structural imbalance, liquidity stress and inherited distortions. The central insight of modern macroeconomics is precisely the opposite: when private demand weakens, when markets fail to allocate efficiently, or when structural rigidities suppress growth, the state must intervene counter-cyclically to restore equilibrium. That is not ideology. That is orthodox macroeconomics.
