After 27 years of uninterrupted democratic development, a division of labour of sorts is emerging around three dates in…

After 27 years of uninterrupted democratic development, a division of labour of sorts is emerging around three dates in Nigeria’s national calendar. October 1 remains our Independence Day, a moment for reflecting on our journey as one nation. June 12 is now the uncontested Democracy Day, when we assess our progress as a democracy since 1999. May 29, meanwhile, is now reserved for evaluating the performance of the sitting government. This arrangement is an unintended innovation of the APC as a ruling party, but I think we should keep it and build on it by clearly delineating the functions of these dates in our national life.

This year’s May 29, however, was particularly significant because it coincided with the emergence of the major contenders for the 2027 presidential election. It was no accident, then, to read essays celebrating President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as Nigeria’s “Reformer-in-Chief”. Such essays were not just to reaffirm the President’s achievements in office so far, but are also prospective arguments for why Nigerians should renew Tinubu’s mandate in 2027. How, then, should we, the people, rather than presidential advisers, assess Tinubu’s economic reform policies specifically, which I call “Tinubunomics”, over the past three years of?

The government’s case for reform is that the economy it inherited in 2023 was heading in the wrong direction, and needed to correct course. Specifically, as the argument goes, fuel subsidy bills had risen so high, they were a burden on public investment. Multiple exchange rates were a recipe for round-tripping by those with privileged access. Electricity tariffs were too low to encourage meaningful investment in the power sector. Painful reforms, the argument concludes, were therefore inevitable, and Nigeria needed a courageous leader in the mould of President Tinubu to take difficult but necessary decisions to rescue us from economic collapse.

The doctor’s diagnosis is broadly correct, if not the medicine they administered. Previous administrations had also mostly agreed with the problem analysis, and some tried to implement a few of the prescribed solutions, but found them too politically sensitive, as was the case with the Buhari administration’s reversal of the withdrawal from fuel subsidies. Equally important, three years into the reforms’ regime, the government does have some encouraging macroeconomic data to support its triumphant narrative during the anniversary celebrations.

Nigeria’s GDP has recorded growth rates of about 4% in recent quarters, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), despite the renewed conflict in the Middle East and its global inflationary pressures. Nigeria’s external reserves are reportedly approaching $50 billion, while the Nigerian stock market is currently among the world’s best performing, according to news reports. Above all, however, revenues accruing to the state and local governments from federal allocation account have consistently doubled or tripled their pre-2023 levels since subsidy removal and exchange-rate reforms.

Yet, after three years in operation, Nigerians are now well placed to make their own judgment about Tinubu’s economic policies, that is, Tinubunomics. As a set of economic policies, Tinubunomics rests on the transfer of economic burdens from the state and corporate entities to ordinary citizens, combined with increased extraction through taxation and borrowing, but without a corresponding expansion of public investment and social protection. Tinubunomics, in others words, is austerity without welfare. The Tinubu government demands that ordinary citizens should tighten their belts to the bones, taxes out what is left of the bones, borrows away the future of Nigerians yet unborn, but gives little by way of public spending or safety net.

After three years, we can now all see that the removal of fuel subsides essentially shifted both the hidden costs of corruption in the sector and the real costs of transportation and energy from the government to ordinary Nigerians and small businesses. The so-called exchange rate unification also only effectively transferred the burdens of naira devaluation to Nigerians through higher import prices, and by implication, higher prices of goods and services, and all in a context of historically low incomes. The increase in electricity tariffs do nothing else but shift the burden of an underperforming power sector from the Discos to ordinary Nigerians, even when supply remains limited, and new investment in the sector is about zero.

Tinubunomics reforms have merely withdrawn existing forms of economic protection and transferred the burdens from the state or corporate entities directly and almost entirely to ordinary citizens. For millions of Nigerians, this much is clear in lived reality, if not in theory. The chief effect of Tinubu’s economic policies, whether intended or not, is to strip away the social and economic protections that, pre-2023, kept prices low and life generally tolerable for tens of millions of Nigerians. With those protections gone in the name of a prophesied reform, we can see clearly that Tinubunomics is nothing special but an extreme version of a Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), that is, SAP on steroids.

The second dimension of Tinubunomics is extraction through taxation, and borrowing, which is itself a form of future taxation. Beyond pushing the burdens of corruption and inefficiencies in the fuel subsidy and currency exchange sectors onto Nigerians, the Tinubu administration has added in a drive for increased taxation. Nigerians facing a persistent cost of living crisis are further required to bear greater fiscal responsibilities in country well known for systemic corruption. How many former governors and other public officials have been under investigation for alleged corruption since 2023?

It was clear, or should have been, that increased revenues from taxation or fuel subsidy removal would not necessarily mean greater benefits for a pauperised populace. Yet, Tinubunomics goes beyond extracting more tax from citizens whose economic protections it has stripped away. It also means borrowing away the future of unborn Nigerians at unprecedented levels. If an institution like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is warning Nigeria that it is taking out $5 billion in bad debt through barely understood loan systems, then Nigeria’s borrowing strategy must really be messed up. After all, nothing makes the IMF happier than to see countries like Nigeria take out bad debts, even if it is preferably from itself.

The most disturbing dimension of Tinubunomics, however, is that this government spends very little on Nigeria and Nigerians in terms of public investments or social safety nets. Countries undertaking painful economic reforms often cushion the effects on citizens through unemployment benefits, food assistance, robust public transportation, universal healthcare, targeted cash transfers, or mass employment programmes through large-scale infrastructure projects. All of these require massive public spending, but none of them has existed in Nigeria over the past three years, making the burden of reform unbearably heavy on ordinary Nigerians.

It is true that fuel subsidies were expensive, inefficient and corrupt. But in the absence of reliable public transportation systems, functional public education and healthcare, or other social security benefits, fuel subsidies were about the only safety nets, ordinary Nigerians enjoyed, however imperfectly or indirectly. Removing fuel subsidies without alternative protections in place was simply bad policy, not merely a question of poor implementation. Much the same applies to naira devaluation and arbitrary increases on electricity tariffs.

Still, implementing all three policies at once without much public spending is infinitely worse, since government spending is really the key to economic recovery, particularly in countries like Nigeria. Government spending for infrastructure, education, health, and other public services breathes real life into the local private sector, expands jobs, and creates opportunities for shared prosperity. If the government is spending, and spending massively, “the money will circulate, and everyone will get something”, to paraphrase a familiar Nigerian saying.

Instead, under three years of Tinubunomics, we are left with news reports of N35 million released for the capital expenditure of a whole federal ministry or of local contractors repeatedly protesting in the streets for their unpaid contractual obligations. All of these in a country of 230 million people. But if the foregoing is a conceptual sketch of Tinubunomics, what are its consequences in terms of the lived experiences of Nigerians, as against the government’s flowery macroeconomic indices on paper? See you next week, God willing.

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