Nigeria waived N34 trillion in import duty in a single year. That is more money than the entire federal government spent in 2025.

The disclosure came almost by accident, buried inside a Senate hearing about agencies that had skipped an invitation to appear. Customs Comptroller-General Bashir Adeniyi told the Senate Committee on Finance that Import Duty Exemption Certificate approvals reached about N34 trillion in 2025. Roughly 60 per cent of that figure was tied to military hardware procurement linked to Nigeria's security challenges.

Read that number again slowly. Nigeria's entire 2025 federal budget was smaller than what the government waived in import duty in the same year. This is not spending. It is revenue the government chose not to collect, on goods someone was already planning to bring into the country.

The military justification is real and defensible on its own terms. A country fighting insurgents in the northeast and bandits across the northwest has a legitimate case for waiving duty on hardware it needs. Nobody serious argues Nigeria should tax its own security equipment at the border.

The other 40 per cent is the part worth pausing on. That portion of N34 trillion, whatever falls outside the military justification, is still a sum large enough to make the entire WAEC fee argument look almost absurd by comparison. The government's stated reason for raising exam fees was rising operational costs for two examination bodies serving millions of Nigerian teenagers. Whatever that cost is, it is a rounding error against N34 trillion moving through an exemption process with far less public scrutiny than a fee list published to parents.

The same Senate hearing exposed a second problem. The committee, chaired by Senator Sani Musa, threatened sanctions against four agency heads. The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, the Industrial Training Fund and the Federal Medical Centre in Jabi. Their offence was failing to show up when summoned to explain their own revenue performance. These are agencies whose leadership did not consider a Senate finance hearing important enough to attend in person.

Put the two facts side by side. A trillion-scale exemption regime moves with minimal friction and gets explained away as a wartime necessity. Revenue-generating agencies skip oversight hearings without visible consequence beyond a warning. Meanwhile, a family paying N50,000 to sit their child for WAEC becomes a national controversy within a single weekend.

Nigeria does not have a shortage of money moving through its system. It has a shortage of scrutiny applied evenly across where that money goes.