When a colourful chart began to circulate online showing Lagos as the biggest winner of federal projects under President Bola Tinubu, the outrage was instant. Commentators repeated the numbers with glee: Lagos, they said, had swallowed ₦3.9 trillion in just two years. For many Nigerians outside the South-West, it felt like confirmation of long-standing fears that the city at the coast was monopolising national resources.
But inside government, officials told a very different story.
The Director-General of the Budget Office, Tanimu Yakubu, pushed back hard. According to him, the viral chart was built on a misclassification. “Bundle together national corridors and highways that merely pass through Lagos, and you create the illusion of Lagos gluttony,” he argued. Once those projects were disaggregated, Lagos’ “exclusive” bucket fell to about ₦1.2 trillion, while the North-West emerged as the true heavyweight with ₦5.97 trillion worth of commitments.
That figure, if correct, would place the North-West far ahead of the South-South’s ₦2.41 trillion, the North-Central’s ₦1.13 trillion, and the modest tallies for the South-East and North-East.
Yakubu cited examples: the revival of the 255MW Kaduna Power Plant abandoned for years, the ongoing AKK gas pipeline, and the Kano–Maradi rail line which government says is nearly two-thirds complete. In his telling, these are not footnotes but evidence of a deliberate North-West-first strategy — a mix of continuity, gratitude, and infrastructure balance.
Yet one line repeated in defence of this argument does not add up. Some reports claim that ₦5.9 trillion equals “40% of the budget.” That math is shaky. Nigeria’s 2025 budget is about ₦47 trillion; ₦5.9 trillion is closer to 12–13 percent, not 40. If “40%” refers to a smaller basket of big projects, the denominator was never disclosed. Presenting it as “40% of the budget” is misleading.
So which version should Nigerians believe: Lagos at ₦3.9 trillion or the North-West at ₦5.97 trillion? The truth is that both are half-right. It all depends on how you count.
If you treat every project that touches Lagos as a Lagos project, then the city looks like a bottomless pit of federal money. If you classify highways, bridges, and rails as national arteries serving multiple zones, Lagos’ figure shrinks while the North-West balloons. Both lenses are legitimate, but they answer different questions. One measures location, the other measures function.
That is why two narratives can run in parallel, each looking convincing, yet each incomplete.
What this debate really exposes is not Lagos greed or North-West privilege, but the absence of transparent, auditable data. Nigerians do not have access to a project-level ledger that shows line items, geo-coordinates, contract sums, releases, and completion rates. Instead, they must rely on duelling interpretations: government press releases on one hand, media aggregations on the other.
Until such a dataset exists, budget politics will remain a battle of charts and spin. Lagos will be painted as the glutton today, the North-West tomorrow, and another zone the day after. Citizens will be left to argue over narratives rather than facts.
For now, one conclusion seems safe: the Lagos-versus-North debate tells us more about how projects are classified than about who actually benefits. And unless Nigeria embraces true transparency, the fight over “who got what” will never end.
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