Tinubu’s Four-Year Gamble: Stable Numbers, Hungry Nigerians, and a Rot That Won’t Be Fired
By Wale Wali
The loudest voices on Nigeria’s economy are each telling half a story. The government reads out the scoreboard, and the opposition holds up the empty fridge. Both are describing the same country.
The scoreboard is real
Tinubu did what his predecessors lacked the nerve to do. The fuel subsidy and the multiple exchange rates were costly rackets that everyone knew about and nobody dared kill. He killed them within weeks, and the figures since are hard to wave away.
Inflation has eased for three straight months, to 15.39% in August. Gross reserves stood at $55.22 billion at the end of October, and they crossed $53 billion in August for the first time in over 17 years. Nigeria has also left the FATF grey list. Even the World Bank calls the exchange-rate and subsidy reforms “foundational.”
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But a country is not a spreadsheet
The World Bank estimates 139 million Nigerians lived in poverty in 2025, and poor households spend up to 70% of their income on food. A reserves figure does not buy rice. Even a presidential aide has conceded that the reforms increased poverty.
The government’s best defence is that the poverty number includes people who are merely vulnerable, and that the misery predates this administration. That is the line the Budget Office DG has taken. It is fair as far as it goes. But blaming the last government is a leader’s oldest alibi, and it expires three years into your own term.
What he should have done: the missing half of the reform
The criticism is not that Tinubu removed the subsidy but that he removed it without first building what was meant to catch people when it went. Here is what a better-sequenced programme would have looked like. These are my proposals, drawn from the arguments economists and critics make, not settled facts.
1. Build the safety net before pulling the trigger. The original plan for N8,000 monthly transfers to 12 million households was withdrawn after public controversy, with the government promising a review. The money eventually flowed, but late, in small tranches, and unevenly. Nigeria already had a National Social Register of 19.7 million poor and vulnerable households.
A government that had the list, a direct-to-bank payment system and a World Bank facility should have paid larger, predictable transfers from week one. The subsidy savings were the funding source, so the relief should have launched at the same moment.
2. Treat food as the front line, not an afterthought. Poor families spend most of their income on food, so food prices are the real inflation rate for them. Declaring a food emergency was sensible, but it came after the pain. A faster response would have put money into the things that actually lower prices: farm inputs in time for the planting season, rural roads and storage so harvests stop rotting before they reach markets, and security for farmers in the belt where insecurity keeps land idle. Temporary import-duty relief on staples could have bridged the gap while domestic supply caught up.
3. Scale cheap transport faster. The CNG programme is a genuinely good idea. It has reached more than 28 states, with thousands of buses and tricycles deployed. But a commuter in Lagos or Kano feels fuel costs every single day. A bolder rollout, with mass-transit buses on major corridors first, would have eased household budgets within months instead of years.
4. Cheaper credit and power for the people who create jobs. Small traders, tailors, welders and food processors employ most Nigerians, and they are squeezed by expensive money and unreliable electricity. The central bank’s benchmark rate, though cut, is still 23%. Subsidised lending windows for small producers and fast-tracked solar mini-grids for markets and industrial clusters would have targeted job creation directly. Growth that comes from big oil and finance numbers does not automatically reach the roadside workshop.
5. Make the elite feel the pain first. Asking households to tighten their belts is credible only when government visibly does the same. That means a published, line-by-line account of subsidy savings, a leaner executive and legislature, and an end to perks that look obscene against the minimum wage. The World Bank has urged stronger public financial management so every naira spent yields measurable development results. Few things build reform legitimacy faster than seeing the powerful absorb a share of the cost.
6. Fix the tax message before launching the tax law. The new tax regime is meant to merge more than 60 overlapping taxes and remove nuisance levies on small businesses. That is sensible. But allegations that the enacted laws had been altered led many Nigerians to demand a halt, which dented trust in a reform that needed it. Transparency in drafting would have cost nothing and protected the whole project.
The Government’s reply
Fairness requires saying that several of these were attempted. The cash transfer programme gave beneficiaries N75,000 over three tranches and is targeting 15 million households. There is a food emergency, a farm-input drive and a commodity board. Defenders add that the fiscal room was tight, that debt limits how much relief the state can afford, and that spending too heavily on handouts could have reignited inflation. Those constraints are real. But “we tried a version of it” is the problem. The scale and speed were not matched to the size of the shock.
The rot test: corruption
On corruption the evidence supports neither camp. Nigeria sits 142nd of 182 countries in Transparency International’s 2025 index, with a score of 26 out of 100. The score did not move, which the local chapter described as stagnation. The EFCC’s recoveries are not trivial: N566 billion, $411 million and 1,502 properties between October 2023 and September 2025. But the sharpest question remains whether the administration is building real institutional accountability or mostly going after politically weakened targets.
The verdict
Can four years clear decades of rot? No, and anyone who says yes is selling something. Countries that climbed out of chronic mismanagement took a generation and several governments. But four years can break the worst habits, and by that standard Tinubu has broken two big ones: the subsidy and the multiple exchange rates. He has not broken the belief that public office is a private opportunity.
His real failure is one of sequence and nerve. He bravely took the pain up front, then rationed the relief. A government that had paid out generous transfers on day one, backed farmers before the planting season, and visibly cut its own fat would be asking for patience from a much friendlier electorate. Instead it is asking for credit on delivery that has not arrived. Whether it does in the months before 2027 will decide how history reads this experiment.
Wali, writes from Abuja.
