Nigerians are so divided and their partisan preferences so cast in concrete that, in most circles, there is hardly any room for dissent or alternative viewpoints. The biting economic hardship which flagellates us all has rendered some people incapable of buying any hope agenda in this season of Tinubu’s “Renewed Hope”. They can’t be bothered with the niceties of whether the glass of progress is half full or half empty.

Quit the sophistry, they’ll charge you. Their pantries are empty, their bellies are groaning — or “Ebi npa wa” (“we are hungry”), as Lagosians once chorused to the president’s hearing. Look into the kitchen of the average Nigerian to see if at all anything is cooking before you inflict your long-winded economic theories on him. A hungry man is allergic to logic.

Economy

Economists have told us that in terms of economic growth, Nigeria’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) expanded by 3.84% year-on-year in Q4 2024, up from 3.46% in Q4 2023. The growth was primarily driven by the services sector, which recorded a 5.37% increase and contributed over 57% to the total GDP. The World Bank forecasts a 3.3% GDP growth rate for 2025, indicating that structural reforms may yield more pronounced economic benefits in the coming years.

Tinubunomics may potentially encapsulate the hope for tomorrow, but the taste of the theory is in its practice. The thinking of the common man is this: How can my country be said to be doing so well when I’ve been reduced to bare bones?

In soccer, a game of two halves, the half-time period is spent re-strategising to reinforce the tactics deployed in the first half, or to correct perceived weaknesses that could stultify the overall game plan. It may be necessary to change some players or switch their positions. That is where you know the difference between a boy-coach and a man-coach.

The most obvious difference between the last two years and the preceding eight is that there is a sense of mission among many of the ministers because of the likelihood of a cabinet reshuffle. Under the previous administration, one of the regular jokes on social media was that there was nothing as permanent as President Buhari’s appointments because once your name was announced as a minister, you were sure of running the entire term without interruption.

Petroleum

At last, there was some stirring in the all-important petroleum ministry. The most consequential decision so far taken by the Minister of Petroleum who is also the chief of state, is the change of guards at the NNPCL. For decades, the national petroleum company had been run like a cult. Nigerians were at the receiving end of sharp practices and intermittent shortages. However, since the removal of the opaque subsidy regime and the coming onstream of Dangote Refineries, there has been a measure of stability – even if motorists now have to pay through the nose!

However, it is difficult to appreciate the logic behind allowing petroleum imports when Dangote has built the world’s largest refinery here. The middlemen who used to sell imported products to motorists pretend they’re on the side of the consumers, but if experience, is any guide, all they want is a chance to import substandard petroleum products and maximise their profits. President Tinubu and his petroleum minister (himself) shouldn’t have any problems harmonising thoughts on this matter.

In the next couple of years, the government’s aim should be stopping crude oil theft while simultaneously increasing the number of active wells. A good gauge of progress would be the number of barrels produced per day. The immediate target of 2 million bpd should be realisable before this time next year.

In addition to the loan scheme for tertiary students, the government has to plan a special intervention in teacher remuneration. Happily, there hasn’t been any Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) or Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) strike in the last two years, but a situation where a professor earns less than 5% of a senator’s salary is unjust and primitive.

Tinubu has succeeded in introducing a tax reform law to end the obsolete tax law that made Nigeria one of the countries with the lowest tax-to-GDP rate. The common man’s interest is how this can give him life more abundant as against the historical reality of providing more lucre for politicians.

Critics

Official figures contend that the Tinubu administration has successfully reduced Nigeria’s budget deficits from 50% in 2023 to about 23% in 2025, a revelation that hasn’t impressed critics of the administration. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s verdict of President Tinubu’s first two years is predictably damning.

“Policy after policy under this administration has targeted the poor while providing relief and advantage to the rich. From healthcare to education to identity management and basic public services, Nigerians are now faced with class-based systems where the wealthy enjoy VIP treatment, and the rest are left behind,” Atiku said.

The prime socio-political group of the Southeast, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, also castigated the Tinubu administration over the general hardship being experienced by Nigerians:  “Nigerians are enduring untold hardships as a direct consequence of the ongoing experimental leadership failures propagated by a cadre of incompetent ministers and political appointees,” its statement said.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) through its National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba, challenged President Tinubu to “urgently address the issue of insecurity, reverse all economically suffocating policies and check the wholesale corruption, greed, unbridled profligacy, reckless misdirection of resources, arrogance in failure and totalitarian tendencies in his administration.”

But the ruling party, All Progressives Congress (APC), robustly defended Tinubu’s performance from various angles. Its National Publicity Secretary, Felix Morka, argued that Tinubu’s actions were aimed at saving Nigeria from exploitation, unlike his predecessors who, he claimed, acted only to secure funds for short-term needs.

According to him, “All the Presidents who came before this President preferred to simply postpone the doomsday. We didn’t just wake up in the last two years to realise that fuel subsidy was a destructive device in our country. We’ve always known that.”

Morka’s perspective was reinforced by the Deputy President of the Senate and First Deputy Speaker of the ECOWAS Parliament, Senator Barau I. Jibrin, who declared in his statement that, “The country in the past 24 months under the able leadership of President Tinubu, the visionary leader of our time, has been repositioned. Of course, he inherited a lot of challenges. But he has come up with programmes and policies to surmount these challenges… We have seen how he has genuinely dealt with our twin main challenges: security and economy. We know we are not where we want to be, but the journey has started. It is work in progress.”

Going Forward

The Financial Times waxed positive in its editorial on Tinubu’s midterm:

“Halfway through the first presidential term of Bola Tinubu, Nigeria is in better shape than at any time in the past decade. That may come as a surprise – or even sound like a sick joke – to tens of millions of Nigerians who are suffering the worst cost of living crisis in a generation. Yet Tinubu…  has stabilised the economy and laid the groundwork for a broader recovery.”

Going forward, if you ask me, I would say the three most urgent problems the Tinubu administration must overcome in the critical second half of his current mandate are the following:

Security.

Security.

Security.