Three Years On: Assessing The State of Nigeria’s Economy Under Tinubu

JONATHAN NDA-ISAIAH writes that three years after Tinubu’s shock reforms, the macro numbers and the human experience of Nigeria’s economy remain stubbornly far apart.

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Three years ago, President Bola Tinubu stood at Eagle Square and declared Nigeria “open for business.” Hours later, he scrapped the fuel subsidy. Weeks later, he unified the exchange rate. The moves were swift, bold, and painful.

Today, the country is still counting the cost and looking for the dividend. Inflation climbed to 34.6% in late 2024 before slowing. The naira fell from N460/$ to over N1,500/$ on the official window, then steadied. Petrol moved from N185 to above N900 per litre. Yet the government points to 3.4% GDP growth in Q1 2026, rising tax revenues outside oil, and a current account surplus not seen in a decade.

On the streets of Oshodi and Sabon Gari, the debate is not about GDP. It is about whether the salary can last till the end of the month. For manufacturers, it is whether they can source dollars without having to queue for months. For farmers, it is the cost of fertiliser and diesel.

This assessment goes beyond press statements. We examine what changed, who gained, who lost, and what the data says versus what Nigerians feel. We track five key pillars: subsidy removal, FX reform, revenue, debt, and jobs.

Three years on, the verdict on Tinubu’s economy is still being written. Here is what we know so far.

The Big Bang: Subsidy Removal and Its Aftershocks

The petrol subsidy was always a fiscal time bomb. By early 2023, Nigeria was spending more on keeping petrol cheap than on health, education, and infrastructure combined. The NNPCL was remitting almost nothing to the federation account. The official line was welfare. The operational reality was that the bulk of the subsidy benefit flowed to fuel importers, tanker owners, and a logistics chain riddled with fraud.

Removing it was said to be a correct policy by economists. However, the manner and timing announced on inauguration day, with no cushion in place, was a political and humanitarian gamble that landed hard on the poor.

The fiscal consequences were immediate and dramatic. Government revenues nearly doubled within the first year. FAAC gross revenues rose to N37.4 trillion in 2025. The World Bank confirmed that aggregate collections by Nigeria’s main revenue agencies climbed from N16.5 trillion in 2023 to N29.5 trillion in 2024. Money that had been burning in a subsidy queue was at least partially redirected to the federation account.

The social consequences were equally immediate. Transport fares doubled overnight. Food prices followed. Businesses dependent on petrol-powered generators, that is, most Nigerian businesses, absorbed cost shocks and passed them directly to consumers. The poor, who spend the highest proportion of their income on food and transportation, bear the heaviest load. The administration’s promised cash transfer programme to cushion the blow moved more slowly than the pain it was designed to address.

The honest assessment is that the subsidy removal was the right decision, but it was executed without adequate preparation for its human consequences.

The Naira’s New Reality: Life After the Float

Before June 2023, Nigeria operated a fiction. The official exchange rate bore little relationship to what anyone actually paid for dollars. The gap between the official and parallel market rates had become a permanent subsidy for those with access to the official window, again, the well-connected and a permanent tax on everyone else.

The CBN’s unification of the exchange rate windows on 14 June 2023 ended that fiction. What it replaced it with was a naira that found its genuine market value, and that value, after years of artificial support, was brutal. The currency fell from roughly N460/$ to over N1,500/$ within months before the CBN began stabilisation operations.

Three years on, the picture is mixed but measurably improved from the worst of 2024. The CBN cleared a verified $7 billion FX backlog that had paralysed manufacturing and trade for years. Gross foreign reserves climbed to $50.45 billion by February 2026. Capital importation in Q1 2025 reached $5.64 billion, up 67 per cent year on year. The IMF confirmed that portfolio inflows, long absent, had resumed.

For importers and manufacturers who spent years unable to access official FX at any price, the unified market, however expensive, represents a functional improvement over the previous dysfunction. For the average Nigerian whose naira savings lost two-thirds of their dollar value, it remains a wound that has not healed. The naira has stabilised. It has not recovered. Those are two different things.

Government Books: Revenue Up, Debt Still Heavy

The administration’s strongest argument rests on its fiscal numbers, which are genuinely impressive. FIRS posted a record N21.6 trillion in 2024. Nigeria Customs collected N6.1 trillion, a 90.4 per cent improvement over the prior year. The tax reform bills signed on 26 June 2025 consolidated Nigeria’s fragmented tax code into a single, modernised framework that exempts small businesses with a turnover below N100 million in full. The revenue story is real. The debt story complicates it.

Nigeria’s fiscal deficit is projected at 4.4 per cent of GDP, and the administration has continued to borrow to fund operations and infrastructure. The improvement in the debt service-to-revenue ratio — one of the most cited achievements of the administration reflects the revenue side of the equation primarily, improving, not the debt stock shrinking. Nigeria owes more in nominal terms today than it did in May 2023.

The administration’s defenders argue, with some justification, that borrowing to build productive infrastructure is economically defensible provided that revenues grow fast enough to service it sustainably. The critics counter that Nigeria’s debt tolerance is already stretched and that continued borrowing in a high-inflation, weak-naira environment carries compounding risks. Both arguments contain truth. The books are healthier than they were. They are not healthy enough to stop watching closely.

Main Street vs Macro Data: Jobs, Prices, and Poverty

Here is where the gap between the administration’s narrative and lived Nigerian experience is widest, most stubborn, and most important.GDP grew 3.4 per cent in Q1 2026. Headline inflation, after peaking at 34.6 per cent in late 2024, has moderated. The current account has moved into surplus. These are not invented numbers. They reflect real economic activity.

They do not, however, reflect the experience of the approximately 60 per cent of Nigerians the World Bank estimates now live below the poverty line. An additional seven million Nigerians fell into poverty in 2025 alone, even as macro indicators improved. GDP growth that does not translate into wage growth, employment, or affordable basic goods is growth that ordinary Nigerians correctly identify as not being about them.

The minimum wage increase to N70,000, signed into law in July 2024, was a genuine intervention. Only 13 states had implemented it by April 2025, per BudgIT data. The student loan programme reached nearly a million beneficiaries by early 2026, a real social achievement. The CNG conversion programme is building a lower-cost transport alternative. These are nothing.

But they are not yet enough to close the distance between what the macro data records and what a market woman in Sabon Gari, a teacher in Oshodi, or a fresh graduate in Port Harcourt experiences every day. That gap remains the defining political and economic problem of this presidency.

Unfinished Business: Power, Security, and Investor Confidence

Nigeria transmitted a record 5,801.84MW on 4 March 2025, the highest in its history. The grid also collapsed twice in 2025 and again in January 2026. Both facts are true, and together they describe a power sector making genuine but fragile progress, just as a country can post record export revenues while its citizens cannot afford bread.

Security remains the most intractable problem. Banditry, kidnapping, ethno-communal violence, and insurgency across multiple geopolitical zones are not just humanitarian emergencies. They are economic ones. Insecure farming communities mean food scarcity. Insecure highways mean supply-chain disruption. Insecure investment environments mean capital that goes elsewhere. Nearly doubling the defence budget has not yet produced the security dividend the economy needs.

On investor confidence, the signals are genuinely encouraging in the financial sector, where reserves are up, inflows are returning, CBN credibility is slowly rebuilding, and still fragile in the real economy, where the businesses that create jobs and pay wages are navigating a combination of expensive dollars, unreliable power, high borrowing costs, and security anxiety that makes long-term planning extremely difficult.

The National Single Window, launched in March 2026, aims to reduce port clearance times from 21 days to under 7 days. If it delivers, it will materially improve the operating environment for trade.

The Scorecard

To economists, the Tinubu administration has delivered the most structurally significant three-year reform programme in Nigeria’s democratic history. Revenues nearly doubled. The FX market was unified, and reserves were rebuilt. They also say that the law was overhauled. While the local government areas have received financial autonomy. Oil production recovered. Power records were set. A student loan fund reached nearly a million beneficiaries. A new minimum wage became law. And a trade infrastructure that had stalled for a decade went live.

According to Sikiru Adedeji, an economist, ”None of this erases the suffering of millions of Nigerians navigating a painful structural transition in the economy. But the suffering of transition and the suffering of permanent dysfunction are not morally equivalent. One leads somewhere. The other simply continues.

”Nigeria in May 2023 was a country whose economy was running on a lie that you could sustain a welfare state without collecting revenue, maintain a currency without market discipline, and fund national development on the proceeds of crude oil alone. That lie was always going to end. The only question was whether it ended on Nigeria’s terms or the market’s.

”Tinubu chose Nigeria’s terms. The pain is real. The direction is right. And the foundation for the first time in a very long time is actually being built on something solid.”

However, the man on the street may not agree with him. What matters to him is the cost of food today and not tomorrow, according to Engineer Festus Fasipe.

”Tinubu may be building and plannning for tomorrow, but the man on the street is interested in his today and what he is able to take home to take care of his family,” Fasipe added.