Three years ago, President Bola Tinubu walked into Nigeria’s Presidential Villa and signed what became known as the Subsidies Are Gone order — a single executive action that abolished the fuel subsidy that had defined Nigerian politics for decades and, within days, sent the price of petrol more than doubling at the pump. It was the boldest economic move any Nigerian president had made in a generation, and it came without warning, without a transition period, and without a coherent support package for the millions who would be immediately hurt.
Three years later, the picture is deeply mixed.
On one side of the ledger, the numbers tell a story that Tinubu’s economic team is keen to promote. The naira has been substantially unified and, after an initial collapse, has stabilised at a level that — while still weaker than before the reforms — is no longer causing the kind of imported inflation that was devastating household budgets in 2024 and 2025. Foreign investors who had exited Nigeria’s bond market have begun creeping back. The government has raised more domestic revenue than at any point in the country’s history, partly through the removal of fuel subsidies and partly through the simplification of the tax system. Nigeria’s non-oil exports — particularly in agriculture and manufacturing — have grown modestly but consistently for the first time in several years.
On the other side of the ledger, however, is the lived reality of 220 million Nigerians, most of whom have seen their purchasing power erode significantly since Tinubu took office. Food inflation, which the government measures separately from general inflation, has remained stubborn — running at between 25 and 35 percent annually depending on the region. The cost of a typical weekly food shop for a family of five in Lagos has more than doubled since June 2023. Transport costs have risen similarly, squeezing the informal sector workers and small traders who make up the majority of Nigeria’s labour force.
The removal of the fuel subsidy was intended to redirect hundreds of billions of naira from elite capture toward infrastructure and social spending. But three years on, the concrete evidence of that redirection is difficult to find in the daily lives of ordinary Nigerians. Roads that were promised as the first deliverables of subsidy savings remain unpaved. Electricity supply, which had been marginally improving before Tinubu’s reforms, has stagnated as the naira’s depreciation made equipment imports more expensive.
Finance Minister Wale Edun, speaking at a World Bank forum in Abuja last week, acknowledged that the transition had been harder than anticipated. “We knew this would be painful in the short term,” he said. “We took the view that the pain was necessary and that it would eventually produce results. The early evidence suggests it is, but we understand that for families struggling to eat, macro-economic stabilisation is not a comfort.”
The political environment has added to the sense of fragility. Tinubu’s party, the All Progressives Congress, is already navigating a contested succession ahead of the 2027 presidential election, and the economic grievances of ordinary Nigerians are the dominant currency of opposition politics. Former governor of Lagos Babajide Sanwo-Olu has begun making increasingly pointed public remarks about the need for “a government that feels the pain it is causing.”
The World Bank, in its most recent Nigeria Economic Update, said the country was at an “inflection point” — the reforms had laid a foundation, but whether that foundation would support a durable recovery depended entirely on whether the government could translate macro stability into micro-level improvements in livelihoods within the next 18 months. Ahead of the 2027 election cycle, Tinubu has very little margin for error.
