By Kunle Oshobi
THERE IS a number that should shame every official in the Federal Executive Council, rattle every technocrat in the Ministry of Finance, and haunt every Nigerian who has ever waited in a queue for a passport, driven across a collapsed bridge, or sat in the dark through yet another power outage. That number is $24.5 billion, Nigeria’s total projected government revenue for 2026.
Now hold that figure alongside another one: $30 billion. That is the revenue projection for the Dangote Group, a single privately-owned conglomerate, for the same year.
Read that again. One Nigerian businessman’s company is on course to generate more money in 2026 than the entire Federal Government of Africa’s most populous nation. A country of over 220 million people, with vast oil and gas reserves, arable land stretching across six ecological zones, a youthful labour force, and enormous untapped mineral wealth, will collect less revenue than a single corporate empire built by one man.
This is not a statistic. It is a national scandal.
A Revenue Base Built on Sand
Nigeria’s revenue crisis is decades in the making, but successive administrations have treated it as an inconvenience to be managed rather than an emergency to be solved. The Federal Government remains grotesquely dependent on oil receipts, a source that is volatile, depleting, and increasingly subject to the twin pressures of global energy transition and chronic domestic theft. When oil prices fall, or crude production is sabotaged, and both happen with alarming regularity, the entire machinery of the Nigerian state seizes up.
Non-oil revenue, which in any mature economy would constitute the backbone of government financing, remains embarrassingly thin. Nigeria’s tax-to-GDP ratio hovers around 10 percent, one of the lowest in the world, against a Sub-Saharan African average that comfortably exceeds it and an OECD benchmark that dwarfs it. The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) has made notable administrative strides in recent years, but administrative efficiency alone cannot compensate for a structural failure to build and support a thriving taxable economy.
The government cannot tax poverty. It cannot extract meaningful revenue from businesses that are struggling to survive. And yet, year after year, Nigeria’s policy choices seem almost perfectly designed to keep businesses in exactly that condition.
Death by a Thousand Levies, Zero Support
Ask any small or medium-scale business owner in Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt, or Onitsha what the government means to them, and the answer will rarely involve the word “support.” It will more likely involve multiple taxation, federal, state, and local government all dipping their hands into the same shallow pot, arbitrary levies, inexplicable regulatory bottlenecks, and the crushing burden of providing for themselves every infrastructure that the state has failed to deliver.
The average Nigerian manufacturer does not merely make a product. They also generate their own electricity, often running diesel generators that add between 30 and 40 percent to their production costs. They sink boreholes for water. They repair access roads to their own facilities. They provide security. They fund the training that a failing education system did not. They are, in effect, running a country within a country, and still expected to pay taxes to a government that provides them almost nothing in return.
Meanwhile, the regulatory environment remains a labyrinth. Starting a business, accessing credit, obtaining permits, and clearing goods at the ports, each process is a gauntlet of delays, unofficial “facilitation fees,” and bureaucratic opacity. The World Bank’s ease of doing business indices have long placed Nigeria near the bottom of global rankings. These are not abstract data points; they represent real businesses that never got started, real investments that went to Ghana, Rwanda, or Kenya instead, and real jobs that Nigerian youths never got.
The Private Sector: Nigeria’s Most Neglected Asset
The Dangote Group’s projected $30 billion in revenue for 2026 is a remarkable achievement, and Aliko Dangote deserves his laurels. But it also raises a deeply uncomfortable question: what might he, and the hundreds of thousands of smaller, less celebrated entrepreneurs across Nigeria, have achieved with genuine government partnership?
Dangote himself has spoken publicly about the hostile environment in which Nigerian businesses must operate. His refinery, the largest single-train petroleum refinery in the world, was built almost entirely through private capital in the face of extraordinary logistical and regulatory challenges. The government did not build it. Government neglect and mismanagement of the downstream petroleum sector is precisely what created the vacuum that made it necessary.
This is the Nigerian paradox: the private sector has demonstrated, time and again, that it can mobilise capital, execute complex projects, and generate enormous economic value, often in spite of the government, not because of it. And yet economic policy continues to treat business as a revenue target to be squeezed rather than an asset to be cultivated.
Genuine support for private sector growth would look very different from the current approach. It would mean a consistent, reliable power supply, or at a minimum, credible, time-bound plans to achieve it. It would mean roads, ports, and railways that actually function, reducing the logistics costs that make Nigerian goods uncompetitive in regional and global markets. It would mean a financial system genuinely accessible to small and medium enterprises, with interest rates that do not make borrowing prohibitive. It would mean a regulatory environment that is transparent, predictable, and administered by officials accountable to the law rather than to their own pockets. It would mean an education system producing the skills the economy needs, and a healthcare system that does not force businesses to factor employee illness into their cost models.
None of this is fantasy. Countries across Africa, such as Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Côte d’Ivoire, have demonstrated that deliberate, sustained public investment in the enabling environment for business produces dramatic results in economic expansion and, critically, in tax revenue. Nigeria’s government has preferred to talk about diversification while delivering very little of it.
The Revenue Trap Nigeria Has Set for Itself
There is a cruel irony at the heart of Nigeria’s fiscal situation. The government needs more revenue. More revenue requires a larger, more profitable, and more dynamic private sector. A larger private sector requires investment, infrastructure, and regulatory reform that only the government can fully deliver. But the government’s inability to fund itself adequately means it cannot make the investments required to grow the private sector, and so it perpetuates a cycle of low growth, low revenue, and chronic underinvestment.
Breaking this cycle requires political courage, long-term thinking, and a willingness to subordinate short-term revenue grabs to the patient work of building an environment in which businesses can genuinely thrive. It requires the government to see the private sector not as an opponent to be defeated in negotiations over taxes, but as a partner whose success is the government’s own success.
Instead, what Nigerian businesses frequently encounter is a government that raises taxes on struggling enterprises, multiplies compliance requirements without simplifying them, and treats foreign direct investment as a matter of luck rather than deliberate policy. The naira’s instability and the foreign exchange crisis of recent years have driven capital flight and deterred investment at precisely the moment when Nigeria needed the opposite.
A Call to Account
The comparison between Nigeria’s $24.5 billion revenue estimate and the Dangote Group’s $30 billion projection is not meant to belittle the government or to suggest that running a country is the same as running a conglomerate. It is not. The government has obligations to the poor, to national security, to public goods, that no business carries.
But it is meant to illustrate, with brutal clarity, the scale of Nigeria’s revenue failure and what is being left on the table. A government that can be out-earned by a single private group is a government that has failed to develop and harness the productive capacity of its own nation. It is a government that has not created the conditions for businesses to grow, employ, invest, innovate, and pay more in taxes.
Nigeria’s fiscal crisis is ultimately a governance crisis. It will not be solved by more borrowing, more printing of money, or more aggressive pursuit of a narrow tax base that is already creaking under the pressure. It will only be solved when Nigeria’s leaders commit, in deed as well as word, to becoming genuine partners of the private sector, building the infrastructure, reforming the regulations, and providing the stability that Nigerian businesses need to grow from survival into prosperity.
Until then, the spectacle of one company out-earning a nation will remain exactly what it is: a damning indictment of everything this government has failed to do.
Oshobi is a management consultant and development economist based in Lagos. Views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of TheCable or jknewsmedia.com.
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