What’s left for Tinubu: A legacy to sustain, a name to behold

By Opeyemi Eniola President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has already forced Nigeria to confront a set of structural realities that successive administrations preferred to manage, postpone or obscure. On the afternoon of 29 May 2023, standing before the nation after taking the oath of office, he declared that the fuel subsidy was gone. The statement was delivered without elaborate preamble.

It landed with the force of a policy rupture. In the weeks and months that followed he moved to unify the foreign-exchange market, clear a multi-billion-dollar backlog of unpaid obligations, end the Central Bank’s inflationary reliance on Ways and Means advances, and begin the long process of rebuilding external reserves and non-oil revenue. These were not cautious, incremental adjustments.

They were deliberate breaks with a system that had rewarded opacity, subsidised inefficiency, and deferred hard choices for decades. More than three years later, the question that now confronts both the president and the country is no longer whether those decisions were necessary. The necessity is increasingly acknowledged even by critics who continue to dispute the sequencing, the communication or the human cost.

The more consequential question is what remains to be done if the reforms are to become a durable foundation rather than a painful interlude, and whether the name Tinubu will ultimately be associated with courage that delivered lasting improvement or with boldness that stopped short of transformation. That is the subject of this editorial: the unfinished work, the legacy still to be secured, and the standard by which a political name is finally beheld.

The inheritance To understand the scale of what has been attempted, it is necessary to recall the condition of the economy Tinubu inherited. By May 2023 Nigeria faced a combination of fiscal stress, external vulnerability and institutional distortion that had been building for years. The petrol subsidy had become an open-ended claim on public resources, consuming sums that could otherwise have supported infrastructure, education and health while simultaneously encouraging smuggling and rent-seeking.

Multiple exchange-rate windows created opportunities for arbitrage that enriched a narrow circle and starved legitimate producers of foreign exchange. The debt-service-to-revenue ratio had climbed toward 97 percent and, on some measures, threatened to exceed 100 percent, leaving almost nothing for capital expenditure or social investment once interest obligations were met.

External reserves were under pressure. The Central Bank’s Ways and Means advances to government had expanded to levels that fuelled inflation and undermined monetary credibility. Oil theft was estimated in the hundreds of thousands of barrels per day. Investor confidence was fragile. States struggled to meet salary obligations. The macroeconomic dashboard was, in the language of one later retrospective, blinking red.

None of these problems was new. They had been diagnosed repeatedly by domestic analysts, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and successive Nigerian finance ministers. What had been missing was the political willingness to confront them simultaneously and at the beginning of a presidential term, when political capital is theoretically highest and the incentive to defer pain is strongest.

Tinubu chose confrontation. In doing so he accepted a degree of short-term unpopularity that many of his predecessors had calculated they could not afford. The reforms and their macroeconomic results The removal of petrol subsidy and the move toward a more market-determined exchange rate were the signature decisions. They were followed by tax and revenue reforms, efforts to improve the efficiency of collection, and a stated commitment to fiscal discipline.

The results, measured by official and independent data available by late 2026, are substantial. Non-oil revenue has risen sharply. The administration reported that the 2025 non-oil revenue target was achieved by August of that year, with collections exceeding ₦20 trillion, and that September 2025 alone produced ₦3.65 trillion—more than four times the monthly figure recorded in May 2023.

The debt-service-to-revenue ratio has been brought below 50 percent. The government has paid down a significant portion of the Ways and Means stock that had threatened fiscal and monetary stability. External reserves have climbed from approximately $35 billion at the start of the administration to levels above $54 billion by September 2026, the highest in nearly two decades.

Gross reserves have provided a stronger buffer against external shocks and have supported greater confidence in the foreign-exchange market. Real GDP growth has accelerated. After years of weaker performance, growth reached 3.89 percent in the first quarter of 2026 and 4.43 percent in the second quarter, with the first half of the year recording approximately 4.2 percent according to World Bank figures.

Both oil