President Bola Tinubu has challenged Nigerian banks to shift their focus from financing the government to providing affordable credit to businesses and productive sectors of the economy to drive investment, production and job creation.

Mr Tinubu, who was represented by the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, made the call at the 19th Annual Banking and Finance Conference of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN) on Tuesday.

The President said while the government’s economic reforms had restored macroeconomic stability and improved investor confidence, the next phase must focus on converting those gains into investment, production, jobs and improved living standards.

“The current phase of our reform journey is accelerating the conversion of stability into investment, investment into production, production into jobs, and growth into improved living standards,” he said.

He urged banks to move “from intermediation to transformation”, arguing that the performance of financial institutions should no longer be assessed only by balance-sheet growth, profitability and shareholder returns.

According to him, the critical question should be what the financial system is doing for the real economy.

“A resilient banking system cannot assist indefinitely where businesses cannot obtain affordable credit. Manufacturing that is struggling cannot expand, and millions of productive MSMEs remain outside the formal financial system,” Tinubu said.

He said the government was therefore expanding the architecture of guarantees, risk-sharing, blended finance and credit enhancements, with a National Credit Guarantee Company at its core, to crowd in private capital and support productive investment.

The Nigerian leader said success should increasingly be measured by how much productive capital government policies catalyse, rather than simply by how much the government spends.

Banks must finance growth

The President also said the recently concluded bank recapitalisation must result in more than larger balance sheets, stressing that it should translate into increased capital formation in the real economy.

“It must translate into capital formation in the real economy, financing Nigerian businesses as they expand across Africa and pursue our ambition of a $1 trillion economy,” he said.

“A bigger bank that does not finance a more productive economy is a suboptimal outcome.”

He also called for broader financial inclusion, saying access to bank accounts does not automatically translate into access to finance.

He said the financial system should enable small businesses and entrepreneurs to obtain working capital based on viable cash flows rather than collateral they may not possess.

“We must build a system that finances potential and opportunities rather than quick gains for the privileged,” he said.

Mr Tinubu further called for a transition away from a financial system where attractive returns on government securities make lending to productive businesses less compelling.

He said that improving fiscal conditions would allow the government to create more space for private-sector credit progressively.

The President described the desired outcome as a “virtuous cycle” in which stronger fiscal discipline reduces pressure on government borrowing, lower inflation lowers interest rates, and cheaper capital stimulates investment and production.

He added that increased production would generate more jobs, incomes and tax revenues, further strengthening fiscal sustainability.

“That is how gains from reform begin to compound at scale, and the financial sector must be ready for that transition,” he said.

Tinubu also identified technology, long-term capital and trust as key pillars of a resilient financial system, warning that greater digitalisation would bring increased cybersecurity risks.

He said Nigeria would need to deepen its capital markets, insurance, pension, and asset management industries to mobilise domestic savings and foreign capital for long-term investment.

On the broader economy, the President said Nigeria’s GDP grew by 4.43 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, while headline inflation had eased to 15.43 per cent and external reserves had crossed $54 billion.

He said the improvements showed that “stability has returned” and “credibility is rising”, but cautioned that macroeconomic stability should not be mistaken for economic prosperity.

“Stability is a foundation; prosperity is a destination,” Mr Tinubu said.

“The good news”

In his remarks, Dele Alabi, President/Chairman of Council, CIBN, said the good news is that certain policies implemented in the past couple of years are beginning to yield fruit.

For example, he argued that within Nigeria’s financial system, 33 banks met the revised minimum capital requirements, raising ₦4.65 trillion in new capital, providing a further buffer against domestic and external shocks.

READ ALSO: Credit bypassing Nigeria’s job creators — World Bank Official

“Likewise, recent indicators show that these efforts are beginning to rebuild confidence. As announced by Moody’s Ratings on 28 August 2026, Nigeria’s outlook was changed from stable to positive while the sovereign rating was affirmed at B3,” he said.

Additionally, the CIBN president explained that according to FTSE Russell’s March 2026 Semi-Annual Country Classification Review, Nigeria will be reclassified from Unclassified to Frontier market status, effective 21 September 2026.

“To top all this off, the icing on the cake is that according to the latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics’ Q2 2026 Gross Domestic Product Report, real GDP grew by 4.43 per cent year-on-year in Q2 2026, up from 3.89 per cent in Q1 2026,” Mr Alabi said.

He noted that collectively, these are important signals of stronger macroeconomic stability, improved investor confidence, and the prospect of broader access to global capital.

He explained that the true test is whether stronger fundamentals translate into lower living costs, more jobs, higher real incomes, affordable credit, reliable public services and reduced poverty.

“Macroeconomic progress must therefore be felt at the micro level – in households, small businesses and the daily lives of ordinary Nigerians,” Mr Alabi said.

He said it is for this reason that the theme of this year’s Conference is sound, and as Nassim Nicholas Taleb aptly observed in his book Antifragile, “Wind extinguishes a candle and energises fire.”

On August 4, Grant De Swardt, an independent AI consultant in East Sussex, U.K., noticed something strange going on with his Claude Max 20x account. He hadn’t been working that day, yet his token usage was climbing.

The next day, he disabled everything he had attached to Claude and did not work with it. Token consumption again increased. “In the clearest controlled interval, it increased from 45% to 55% while I performed no work, scheduled Cowork tasks were paused or completed, Dispatch/cloud execution was disabled, and there was no corresponding active local Claude Code task,” De Swardt told TechCrunch.

What was eating up his token allowance? He had no idea, so he contacted Anthropic and asked for an itemized list. Anthropic didn’t provide one, but it agreed something was off. It suspended his paid account, invalidated all of his sessions and server-side Claude Code tokens, and issued him a partial refund of £44.49 for the remaining time on his $200-per-month subscription.

The suspension wreaked havok on his business, he told TechCrunch. His job is to help small and mid-size businesses set up agents — a sort of forward-deployed engineer for hire — for tasks like automatically loading purchase-order data from emails into the accounting software.

As a sole proprietor, he relies on agents throughout his whole business, too: daily admin tasks, website design, coding. “Like everything is just running through AI these days,” he said.

After investigating, Anthropic told De Swardt it found the culprit: A compromised Claude session key was used to mint unauthorized Claude Code OAuth tokens. The company told him the account “appeared to have been used by an unauthorized-looking third-party service to handle activity for other people, but they could not determine how it obtained access,” he told TechCrunch. “They say the evidence is consistent either with credentials/session data being taken without my knowledge, or with the account having been connected to an outside service.”

In other words, a hacker was able to obtain access to De Swardt’s account and was covertly siphoning off his tokens. Because account support tracks total usage but not itemized usage, even upon request, this kind of theft could have gone on for months undetected.

He posted his experience on Reddit and after 80 comments, he discovered he was not alone. One person claimed that their account “was auto-upgraded without my consent, my credit card got charged, and the usage shot from 0% to 100% automatically without me even touching it.” Another saw usage go from 0 to 49% in 12 minutes, when all they had used it for was a couple of prompts and a web search.

One Claude user said their account burned through its max tokens every day for three days without them using it at all; this person then created a GitHub report about it. Like with the Reddit post, other users shared similar experiences there, too.

Two of them posted emails from Anthropic where the company had — to its credit — identified and warned them that their tokens were being stolen.

“We have recently become aware of a bad actor that is using common infostealer malware to steal Claude login sessions from people’s computers, then using those login sessions to access Claude accounts and consume their usage,” the email read. Infostealers are a type of malware that installs itself on a user’s computer and steals saved passwords, session data, and login credentials.

When Anthropic saw suspicious activity, it signed the users out, invalidated existing authorizations, issued some refunds, and warned them that they may have malware.

The company also said the malware didn’t come from using Claude itself. Such malware can be picked up from many sources online, from downloading infected software to clicking on infected ads.

Anthropic did not send De Swardt one of those emails. He insists he found no evidence that his computer was compromised and says he still has no way of determining how hackers gained access.

De Swardt’s Claude account was reinstated after about two weeks. But the difficulty of getting speedy help for the matter, plus the lack of an itemized usage, soured him on Claude. He cancelled his subscription in favor of Cursor and its ability to use multiple models, including more affordable open source options.

In his experience, these other models work as well as Claude. “It’s not that much different or better,” he said, adding that he can’t see going back “without [Anthropic] actually having resolved the issue in any way.”

He says Anthropic still lacks tools that allow users to see what’s consuming their tokens. “I don’t think there’s any way that these people can protect themselves.”

When asked for information on how users can identify misuse, Anthropic declined to comment.