Tinubu and perception management deficit

By Fola Arogundade

Ever since May 2023, when he was sworn in, and became the President and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has displayed an ability and willingness to hold the bull by the horns.

He has taken bold decisions and stuck to his guns no matter the pushbacks in the wake of the announcement of such decisions.

His economic, political and social reforms have been far-reaching, often attracting resistance from the public despite their oft-stated good intentions.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is also street-smart, media-savvy and owner of a top-notch national newspaper and a quite visible national television network.

Still, his administration is beset with an apparent Perception Management Deficit; the administration, and the man himself are often the butt of harsh criticism and are perceived as uncaring, belligerent, malevolent and being disconnected from the people he governs.

Obviously, something does not add up, and the question arises; why is the man and his administration perception management deficient?

For clarity, what is a perception management deficit?

A perception management deficit occurs when an individual or organization fails to intentionally shape, align, or monitor how their actions, communication, and behaviors are interpreted by others. It is not about manipulating reality or putting on a facade; rather, it is a failure to bridge the gap between internal reality and external interpretation.

This deficit typically manifests in a few common ways:

The Silent Performer: Delivering exceptional work behind the scenes but neglecting to communicate progress, leading others to assume a lack of impact or initiative.

The Misunderstood Style: Communicating with directness or brevity that is intended as efficiency, but interpreted by team members as coldness or aggression.

The Strategic Disconnect: Working tirelessly on tasks that do not align with leadership’s current priorities, creating a narrative that you are out of touch with organizational goals.

Why the deficit happens

Most perception deficits are not intentional; they stem from cognitive biases and operational blind spots.

The primary culprit is the Illusion of Transparency—a psychological bias where people inherently overestimate how well others understand their intentions, motives, and workload. We assume that because we know we are working diligently and mean well, others automatically see it too.

Additionally, many high achievers view active visibility as “politicking” or self-promotion, actively choosing to ignore perception altogether. In reality, failing to manage perception simply leaves a vacuum—and in human systems, vacuums are inevitably filled by assumptions, which are rarely generous.

Mr President, there is a particular kind of testimony that carries more weight than any press release, and one such piece of testimony has just been delivered on your behalf by a man who owes you no favours. Tony Elumelu, Chairman of Heirs Holdings and the United Bank for Africa, set aside the caution of a man who moves billions across two continents and simply said what he had seen. “I am not a politician, so I’ll speak my truth,” he began, before delivering a verdict that no minister could have delivered with the same authority: “Until 2023, we were losing 97% of our oil production to theft. Today, losses are down to 2%, we retain 98%, and we no longer need to know anyone at the CBN to access dollars.”

It is worth sitting with why that statement matters more than most things said in Aso Rock’s defence. Elumelu is not a party spokesman auditioning for relevance. He is not an appointee whose salary depends on the appearance of progress. He is an operator with 58,000 barrels a day riding on the answer, a man who spent the years before 2023 shouting on social media that Nigeria was haemorrhaging its most important resource to criminal syndicates operating with what looked, from the outside, like total impunity. When a man who once demanded the government name and shame the thieves stealing from his own pipelines turns around two years later and credits that same government with cutting the theft to a fraction of what it was, that is not spin. That is a convert’s testimony, and converts are the hardest witnesses to buy.

The figures he cites are not conjured from air. The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission and independent industry trackers have charted the same trajectory Elumelu describes: a nation that was for years unable to meet its OPEC quota, not for want of reserves but for want of security around its pipelines and export terminals, has in the last two years re-established something resembling control over its most valuable export. Bonny Terminal, which at the depth of the crisis was receiving a trickle of the crude it was built to handle, has come back to life. Shell’s force majeure, once a recurring embarrassment, has receded as a talking point. None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened by press conference. It happened because the Tinubu administration treated oil theft as the national emergency it always was rather than the permanent condition Nigerians had resigned themselves to.

The second half of Elumelu’s statement deserves equal attention, because it touches something even more Nigerians have lived with for longer than oil theft: the indignity of needing a contact at the Central Bank simply to do ordinary business. For the better part of two decades, access to foreign exchange in Nigeria was not a market transaction but a favour, dispensed through a multiplicity of windows and rates that meant your dollar cost depended less on what you were buying than on who you knew. That system did not merely distort the economy; it corrupted it, quietly, at every level, training a generation of Nigerian businesspeople that the shortest path to solvency ran through a CBN desk officer’s goodwill rather than through the strength of one’s balance sheet.

In June 2023, within weeks of taking office, the Tinubu administration and the Central Bank collapsed that entire architecture and replaced it with a single, unified “willing buyer, willing seller” framework. Every segmented window, every discretionary rate, every reason to need a friend at the apex bank, was abolished in one stroke. It was, by any honest reckoning, one of the boldest acts of institutional self-denial any Nigerian government has attempted, because it meant surrendering a lever of patronage that had served every administration before it. The naira adjustment that followed was painful, and no serious commentator should pretend otherwise. But painful is not the same as wrong, and two years on, the reserves have grown, the backlog of foreign exchange obligations that once strangled airlines and manufacturers has been cleared, and Nigeria has returned to international capital markets on terms that reflect a country being taken seriously again rather than one begging for patience.

What makes Elumelu’s testimony different from the usual chorus of praise that surrounds any government is precisely that it is falsifiable. He did not say the economy “feels better.” He gave two specific numbers, tied to a specific asset he personally controls, and a specific institutional practice he personally no longer has to navigate. That is the kind of claim a journalist can check, an analyst can audit, and a rival can contest if it is wrong. No rival has contested it, because it’s not wrong.

Elumelu is not the only global figure whose credibility does not bend to please Abuja. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organisation and a woman who has spent her career auditing the finances of nations far larger and far more scrutinised than Nigeria, has publicly commended the Central Bank’s monetary and foreign exchange reforms as genuine, structural, and overdue. Her voice carries a weight that no domestic commentator’s can match, precisely because it is not domestic; she answers to Geneva, not to Aso Rock, and her assessments are read in the same rooms where Nigeria’s credit rating and investment appeal are decided. When a figure of that standing says the improvement is real, the world listens differently than it does to a minister.

It is true that the filtering down is slower than the government would love, but the healing process must not be truncated at this time. A nation does not heal from decades of institutionalised theft and monetary rationing on the timetable of a news cycle. Structural repair reaches the boardroom before it reaches the market stall, and Elumelu’s numbers are the leading edge of a recovery still making its way down, not the whole of it. That is not a shortfall to apologise for. It is simply how healing works, and the temptation to short-circuit it for the sake of a faster headline is precisely the temptation this administration has, so far, had the discipline to resist.

But testimony like Elumelu’s should not remain the preserve of billionaires, and here the record is thinner than the administration would like — though not, as it happens, empty. NELFUND is not a slogan; it is a working programme, and the numbers say so. By early 2026 it had disbursed over N161 billion to more than 860,000 students, split between direct payments to 263 institutions for tuition and upkeep allowances paid straight into students’ accounts; by March, the total had passed N206 billion across 1.16 million beneficiaries in 270 institutions. Whatever bureaucratic friction remains in getting a cheque out on time, the money is real, it is reaching campuses across the country, and it is doing the one thing scholarship schemes rarely do at this scale in Nigeria: paying tuition directly to the school rather than leaving a student to chase a subsidy that never quite arrives.

Let the artisan and the low-income earner now exempted under the new tax laws describe what that exemption meant at the end of the month. Let the small and medium-scale entrepreneur — the ones who make up the overwhelming majority of Nigeria’s registered businesses and the near-totality of its private-sector jobs — say plainly whether the collapse of the old multi-window forex regime has actually made it cheaper to import a spare part or restock a shop, since it is precisely that segment, more than any oil major, that lived or died by which CBN window it could reach. Let the trader who finally got a loan without a godfather’s phone call tell it the way Elumelu told his. The government does not need better spokesmen; it needs to hand the microphone to the millions of smaller Elumelus the reforms were, in the end, designed for.

There is, in any case, a fourth front where the scale of the intervention will soon be too large to talk around: power. It would be dishonest to pretend the lights have stopped going out. The national grid has collapsed more than twenty times since this administration took office, and as recently as May 2026 the country had 7,311 megawatts of available generation capacity while barely more than half of it, roughly 4,222 megawatts, was actually reaching consumers — the rest stranded by a transmission network too fragile to carry what generation can already produce. Any honest accounting of the power sector has to start there, not end there.

But it is precisely because the grid keeps collapsing that the scale of the current intervention matters. The administration has committed N4 trillion to a rescue plan for a sector that has defeated every government since privatisation, and has already secured something no predecessor managed — a N2.28 trillion final settlement of the debts that had kept generating companies from investing in their own plants. A new Grid Asset Management Company has been stood up specifically to fix the transmission bottleneck that is the actual reason stranded capacity exists: Nigeria’s problem, on the current evidence, is decreasingly about producing power and increasingly about moving it, which is exactly the segment GAMCO now exists to attack. None of this will show up in a single dramatic before-and-after the way Elumelu’s numbers do; a transmission network built over decades of underinvestment does not turn around in one budget cycle, and Nigerians have been promised light before and had reason to doubt it. But there is a real difference between a government that keeps announcing new slogans over an unfixed grid and one that has retired N2.28 trillion in legacy genco debt and stood up an institution built to solve the specific bottleneck the collapses expose. The grid failures are the argument for the investment, not the rebuttal to it.

There is a fifth front, quieter than the rest, and it belongs to the states rather than Abuja: the ability to simply pay their workers. For close to thirty years it was unremarkable, almost expected, for a Nigerian state to fall behind on salaries. That is no longer the baseline. Monthly federation allocations, which averaged closer to N300 billion under previous administrations, have crossed N2 trillion a month, with a record N2.8 trillion disbursed in June 2026 alone — a direct consequence of subsidy removal and forex unification putting real revenue, rather than borrowed revenue, into the federation account. According to the Finance Minister, no state currently struggles to meet its salary obligations, a claim that would have sounded implausible in 2022. What the states do with that headroom is now genuinely their own decision rather than a Lagos-imposed constraint, and it is fair to ask governors to answer for it. But the precondition for that accountability — money that actually exists, on time, every month — did not exist three years ago. Nigerians who still measure their state governments by the excuse of an empty treasury are, increasingly, measuring the wrong thing; the treasury is no longer empty, and the harder, fairer question is now what each state chooses to build with what it has.

Two years ago, Nigeria was losing its oil to thieves and its businesspeople were losing their dignity to a rationing system dressed up as monetary policy. Today, by the account of a man who has no political career to protect and every commercial incentive to tell the truth, both of those things have changed. That is not propaganda. That is arithmetic, and arithmetic does not need a spokesman — though it would do no harm to let more Nigerians say so themselves.

• Arogundade, FNGE, ([email protected]), sent this piece from Abeokuta, Ogun State.