In the grand theatre of economic transformation, no nation ascends the podium of prosperity by clutching the hem of austerity alone. The engines of industrial advancement are neither powered by caution nor sustained by rhetorical idealism; they are driven by bold fiscal pragmatism and guided by visionary stewardship. Nigeria—pregnant with untapped mineral wealth, overflowing with youthful vigor, and rich in unrefined ingenuity—stands not at the edge of despair, but at the precipice of a renaissance. What it requires is neither fear of debt nor infatuation with foreign aid, but the audacity to borrow purposefully and the discipline to invest meaningfully.

It is a puerile fallacy to equate borrowing with economic recklessness. The true peril lies not in the act of borrowing but in the absence of purposeful appropriation. A judiciously borrowed dollar, like a sharpened ploughshare, tills the fertile fields of prosperity. In this context, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu emerges not as a fiscal gambler but as an economist-philosopher—capable of marrying prudence with boldness, expenditure with strategy, and ambition with accountability.

To industrialize, Nigeria must cease being a seller of raw promise and become a nation of refined potential. We must no longer export the metaphorical crude dreams of our soil only to import their realized essence at exorbitant cost. The harmonization of our crude resources into finished goods requires not mere speeches but strategic capital injection. Our mineral-rich subsoil yearns not for neglect but for beneficiation; our factories echo not with productivity but with the haunting silence of abandonment. To animate these dormant sectors, borrowing is not optional—it is existential.

Those who decry national borrowing often do so from the shallow end of economic understanding. They forget that America—the cynosure of modern capitalism—is the world’s most indebted nation, yet the most powerful. Debt, when anchored to vision, is not a burden but a bridge; not a shackle but a shovel. Nigeria’s vast cadestral treasury, iron ore, gold, lithium, bitumen, coal, crude oil, granite, diamonds is an uncut diamond awaiting industrial craftsmanship. What we need is not restraint, but resolve.

President Tinubu must borrow, not to pay salaries or indulge bureaucratic obesity, but to irrigate the roots of national productivity. He must borrow to recalibrate Nigeria’s ailing energy systems, revolutionize agriculture, awaken our manufacturing base, and restore dignity to education. His economic prudence must translate borrowed capital into tangible outputs: roads, refineries, power plants, railways, and industrial parks.

Let us dispense with sentimental economics and embrace productive realism. No farmer waits for rain in a drought when he has access to irrigation. No nation prays for development without financing its foundations. To fear debt while desiring progress is to wish for sunlight and yet hide from the dawn.

Indeed, Nigeria can borrow $500 billion, not as a debtor but as a strategic investor in her own destiny. The only currency more valuable than capital is leadership, and in Tinubu we find a fiscal craftsman with the intellect to channel borrowed funds into catalytic transformation.

So let the President borrow, not as a desperate measure but as a deliberate act of nation-building. Let him rise as a custodian of generational wealth, wielding debt not as a liability, but as a sculptor wields his chisel, cutting away the stone of poverty to reveal the statue of national greatness.

Dr. Abubakar Rajab is a political economist, public affairs analyst, and mining sector investor.