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From Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
In a forceful defence of President Bola Tinubu’s economic and governance record, Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, has described the administration as the one that “took the bullets for Nigeria to survive” after inheriting a near-fiscal disaster in May 2023.
Writing in an opinion piece, Onanuga argued that the opposition’s campaign against Tinubu is built on misinformation and ignores the administration’s achievements over three years of difficult reforms. “With politicking intensifying ahead of the January 2027 election, opposition politicians have escalated their campaign of misinformation and calumny to diminish the impact and achievements of this administration over the last three years,” he wrote.
He stressed that while the campaign might have made sense “two years ago, when the administration was struggling to deal with the unintended consequences of its historic reforms,” it is no longer justified. “But not anymore, as the administration can rightly claim bragging rights for what it has achieved against all odds and why the international community is applauding it for putting Nigeria irrevocably on the path of growth and development.”
Onanuga said President Tinubu faced a profoundly broken system upon taking office. “In May 2023, President Tinubu inherited acute petrol scarcity, an unsustainable petrol subsidy regime due to expire in June 2023, multiple exchange rates, arbitrage, and low revenue, with at least 30 states unable to pay workers, let alone fund infrastructure and social projects. Debt servicing consumed 97 per cent of federal revenue,” he wrote.
He added that food scarcity and inflation were also plaguing the country as farmers abandoned their fields amid a currency squeeze introduced by former CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele.
“President Tinubu, guided by the Renewed Hope Agenda, wasted no time,” Onanuga said. “He threw the ruinous subsidy out of the window from Day One. Days later, he floated the naira and ended the artificial fixing of the naira-to-dollar exchange rate, a system that had enabled well-connected individuals to profit effortlessly.”
The adviser said the president also declared a food emergency and announced the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms to examine outdated tax laws, some of which dated back to the colonial era. Immediate gains included encouraging dry-season farming, with subsidies and inputs provided for farmlands abutting dams and irrigation sites in at least 14 states.
Onanuga acknowledged the hardship in the first year. “Even by President Tinubu’s admission, the early months and the first year were tough as the government implemented its programme. The cost of living went up, and businesses claimed the harmonised exchange rate had put them in the red. A few companies even closed shop and left our shores,” he wrote.
“On the streets, some Nigerians claimed that the policies have left them hungry, a sentiment the opposition still parrots to this day, without any empirical proof.”
He argued that Tinubu’s decision to persist rather than reverse course was decisive. “If not sure of the salience of his reforms, President Tinubu would have taken a reverse gear in fright and abandoned all the new reform policies amid the avalanche of attacks from critics and opposition elements in the media. Instead, he persisted.”
Two years later, Onanuga said, “The story has changed for good.” However, he said opposition elements remain “stuck in the sentiment of 2023/24, unyielding and adamant about acknowledging the many gains and milestones achieved by the Tinubu administration.”
He insisted: “Only the blind will fail to admit that this government has taken the country miles away from the state it inherited in 2023.”
As proof of economic turnaround, Onanuga pointed to the stock market. “In May 2023, Tinubu met the All-Share Index at 53,000 points and the market capitalisation at N30 trillion. Today, the ASI has risen five times, to a record 250,000 and a market capitalisation of N160 trillion,” he wrote.
He said blue-chip companies, including those initially negatively impacted by government policies, are declaring record profits and dividends, and foreign portfolio investors are flocking to Nigeria.
“This is not a bubble. It shows that a fundamental paradigm shift has occurred in the economy, all thanks to the Tinubu administration’s policy direction.”
Onanuga said the impact of the three-year government is best felt at the subnational level. “States that hitherto were unable to pay salaries by May 2023, with months of unpaid obligations to their workers and pensioners, are now doing so with ease and dreaming big about infrastructure,” he wrote, adding: “In every state I have visited, I have seen this development.”
He listed Ogun, Oyo, Nasarawa, Enugu, Ebonyi, Kaduna, Kano, Kebbi and Katsina among states where development projects have sprung up “thanks to President Tinubu’s re-engineering of the federation’s finances and increased allocation to the states.”
He added that when local councils begin to receive their allocations directly from the Federation Account, “the Tinubu effect will ensure that more governance cascades down to the 774 local councils.”
State governors who have benefited from this policy have openly admitted that increased allocations have enabled them to bring social and infrastructural development to their states, Onanuga said. He noted that many opposition PDP governors who joined the APC did so for this reason, not because of claims that President Tinubu bribed them.
He quoted several governors directly. “Governor AbdulRazaq said in December 2024 that his administration embarked on more projects in the first 18 months of Tinubu’s presidency than in his first four years,” Onanuga wrote.
“The Governor of Ebonyi, Nwifuru, who is building iconic underpasses and overpasses in Abakaliki, credited his ambition to President Tinubu.”
Governor Peter Mbah similarly attested to this, “crediting the naira rain from the centre for his programmes.”
Nasarawa State Governor Abdullahi Sule, who understands how Tinubu’s financial re-engineering and the end of the subsidy regime have increased the states’ fortunes, said President Tinubu “has taken the bullets for all of them.”
Onanuga defended the administration’s decision to take loans to finance major infrastructure, dismissing critics who question the borrowing.
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“The most audacious road projects ever undertaken by any administration since independence are the Illela-Sokoto-Badagry and the Lagos-Calabar coastal superhighways,” he wrote.
He noted that President Shehu Shagari conceived the Sokoto-Badagry highway in the early 1980s, but succeeding administrations, afraid of the huge cost, abandoned the project. The Lagos-Calabar highway had also been on the drawing board for decades, but no leader had dared to turn the idea into reality.
“President Tinubu has proven to be a transformative leader who has decided to turn the roads into reality, adding new roads to our road network for the first time beyond those we inherited from the colonialists,” he said.
“Myopic critics of the two roads have assailed the Tinubu administration for taking loans to accomplish them. How else could the roads have been built if we rely only on FG’s share from FAAC?” Onanuga asked.
“Relying solely on federal allocations would mean waiting 50 years or more, with costs ballooning out of reach,” he added, citing the metro rail project in Port Harcourt as an example of a stalled initiative.
In the power sector, Onanuga addressed what he called a distortion of the president’s words on electricity. “Confronted by the administration’s stellar performance, the opposition and media propagandists dredged up a campaign video of the President promising a 24/7 power supply. They distorted his words,” he wrote.
He quoted the president’s actual statement: “Whichever way, by all means necessary, you will have electricity, and you will not pay for an estimated bill anymore. A promise made will be a promise kept. If I don’t keep the promise and I come for a second term, don’t vote for me, unless I give you adequate reasons why I couldn’t deliver.”
Onanuga insisted that the Discos, privatised in 2013 under President Goodluck Jonathan, are responsible for delivering power to end consumers, not the Federal Government.
“What this government has done in the last three years has been to address the problems hindering the capacity of Discos to deliver,” he said, citing efforts to strengthen the grid with Siemens, activate idle GENCOs, plan to clear the N4 trillion legacy debts owed to GENCOs and GASCOs, implement metering with over 2.5 million meters provided to homes, and establish GAMCO, the Grid Asset Management Company, to optimise power supply.
Social programmes: NELFUND, CREDICORP and education stability
Among the administration’s impactful programmes, Onanuga highlighted the introduction of NELFUND and CREDICORP in 2024.
“While Credicorp is making loans available to civil servants to buy Made-in-Nigeria products, NELFUND, with N282 billion committed so far, has made tertiary education more accessible for our children,” he wrote.
He said about 1.6 million Nigerian students have benefited from NELFUND, with school fees and stipends assured.
“The government has also renegotiated the 2009 ASUU-FG agreement, such that in the last three years, our universities, along with the polytechnics and colleges of education, have been spared the disruptive academic strikes,” he added.
Onanuga emphasised that, as a result, a four-year programme in universities, polytechnics and colleges of education is now completed in four years.
“He promised it during the campaign and has delivered,” he said.
He also noted investment in technical schools offering allowances to vocational students and TETFUND funding research grants for academics.
Onanuga acknowledged that the past three years have not been entirely rosy, especially regarding security.
“It has not been all rosy the past three years, especially in the area of making our people safe from the band of bandits and terrorists,” he wrote.
He said the armed forces are locked in an asymmetrical war against bandits and terrorists, neutralising leaders and foot soldiers in several theatres of conflict, while displaced terrorists attack vulnerable areas in some states, killing and kidnapping.
“The government is unrelenting in providing the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and police with the tools they need to wage the war,” Onanuga wrote.
With support from friendly governments such as the United States, France and the United Kingdom, he said there is hope that the menace of kidnappers and their political sponsors will become history.
“The man who has taken the bullets to make Nigeria survive a fiscal disaster is even more willing to take additional bullets to make all Nigerians safe,” he concluded.
Onanuga ended his piece by underscoring the administration’s commitment to its manifesto.
“In recent weeks, I revisited the manifesto and policy ambitions that won us the election. The Tinubu administration has faithfully implemented its Renewed Hope Agenda, striving to resolve in three years the cumulative problems of decades,” he wrote.
