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From my readings, it is obvious that leadership, at its most consequential, demands two complementary virtues. These are the courage to make difficult decisions and the empathy to stand with those who bear the pains of those decisions. This means that courage without empathy is recklessness dressed in doggedness. On the other hand, empathy without courage is sentiment dressed in inaction. Very few administrations in Nigeria’s democratic history have tested this mix more sharply than that of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who assumed office three years ago with a promise anchored in ‘Renewed Hope,’ a phrase that now defines his presidency.
From his inauguration speech, Tinubu declared an end to Nigeria’s petrol subsidy regime. He followed up by unifying the multiple foreign exchange windows, thus floating the naira. Both decisions were marketed as courageous, necessary, and overdue. Indeed, they were acts of serious leadership. The administration positioned them as the kind of rigid choices that weak leaders avoid and strong ones embrace. But a critical examination of Tinubu’s leadership reveals a fundamental contradiction in his courage.
Tinubu and his allies have consistently portrayed the subsidy removal and naira floatation as defining acts of bravery. They said he took the bullet for Nigeria. Of course, the argument has some intellectual merit because the petrol subsidy regime had consumed fiscal resources that could have funded Nigeria’s infrastructure. It enriched a network of opaque middlemen while superficially serving the poor. Also, the multiple foreign exchange rate system, long identified as an aberration, starved Nigeria of foreign investment, rewarded currency traffickers, and weakened the productive economy. The decision to unify them, while painful in its immediate inflationary consequences, was broadly supported by international financial institutions and development economists as an overdue structural correction.
On these two fronts, there is a defensible case for courage. The question, however, is not whether those were difficult decisions. It is rather a question of whether they constitute the full expression of the leadership courage that Tinubu advertises. This question extends to whether that courage is matched by empathy for those it has wounded. This is imperative because genuine leadership courage is not episodic. It does not apply itself to economic restructuring while dodging politically inconvenient battles. This is where the most damning critique of Tinubu’s brand of courage lies. And it is ruthlessly selective.
For instance, the Tinubu administration has done very little that resembles courageous confrontation of corruption, especially within its cabinet and governance cycle. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) have continued their historically uninspiring work of pursuing low-hanging targets like ‘Yahoo Boys’ while major systemic corruption goes largely undisturbed. Critics have also pointed to the pattern of politically motivated prosecution and politically shielded impunity that characterises the administration. The courageous leader who could announce subsidy removal in his first sentence as president has not found equivalent resolve to dismantle the patronage networks, procurement fraud, and oil revenue opacity that collectively cost Nigeria far more than subsidy ever did. Courage, apparently, has its limits, and they align with the boundaries of political self-interest.
The irony is that the same administration that positions subsidy removal as leadership bravery has not mustered comparable courage against the corruption that makes those subsidies necessary in the first place. These include the fuel importation cabal, the meter-reading mafia in the energy sector, or the layers of bureaucratic theft that consume public funds before they reach their intended beneficiaries including unconstitutional and illegal offices of first this and first that. Real economic courage would attack both symptoms and causes, not just treat the symptoms.
The government’s imprint on security is also terribly troubling. Nigeria is ranked as one of the world’s most challenged nations in terms of security. Banditry in the Northwest continues to displace millions and interrupt agricultural production. It has worsened food insecurity. Boko Haram and ISWAP rule in the northeast and are now extending to the southwest. Kidnapping for ransom has become normalised. Farmer-herder violence claims lives with assured regularity. A leader of genuine courage would have made restructuring the security architecture and resourcing the fight against insecurity a centrepiece of governance. Instead, security policy under Tinubu has been characterised by symbolic gestures that leave much to the imagination. Physical insecurity, the kind that forces a farmer to abandon his field or a parent to keep a child home from school, is a form of suffering that the President’s advertised courage has not addressed.
If Tinubu’s courage is incomplete, his empathy is worse. Empathy in leadership is not the rhetorical acknowledgement that “times are hard.” It is rather the active, policy-driven effort to ensure that those most vulnerable to the consequences of courageous decisions are not left to absorb them. Sadly, for the government, empathy is largely theatrical.
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The subsidy removal was implemented without a credible, pre-deployed social safety net, and it unleashed an unexpected cost-of-living crisis that disproportionately devastated Nigeria’s lower and middle classes. It forced petrol prices to triple overnight, spiked transport costs, and increased the prices of food, medicine, house rents and basic commodities. The naira’s float, economically rational in principle, reduced the purchasing power of salaries and savings and widened inequality. Systematically, it pushed millions deeper into poverty.
The administration’s response was assurances of palliatives, rice and noodles distribution exercises, and promises of social investment expansion. These have proven to be inadequate to address the scale of the humanitarian fallout of his courageous decisions. The government’s cash transfer programme is shadowy, lacks integrity and plagued by practices that undermined previous welfare interventions in the country. A leader with genuine empathy would have understood that the credibility of his courage depends on the reality of the relief he provides to those who pay the price. In the absence of that, courage without empathy is simply the powerful imposing pain on the powerless and calling it reform.
True empathic leadership would have demanded several things that the Tinubu administration conspicuously failed to deliver. These include a functioning, pre-positioned social protection infrastructure before the subsidy was removed; a serious wage-review mechanism that keeps pace with inflation for workers in the formal and informal sectors; and concrete housing, healthcare, and food security interventions. It would also push for visible accountability for the funds that were supposed to flow from subsidy savings to welfare programmes. These are evidently absent.
What makes this courage and empathy failure particularly acute is that it reveals a leadership style that is fundamentally disconnected from the experiential reality of ordinary Nigerians. Tinubu’s governance operates at the level of macro-economic narrative, where the storyline of “necessary pain for long-term gain” means more to WEF, WB and IMF, but offers cold comfort to a foodstuff trader in Wuse market whose income has been halved by inflation, or a civil servant in Zamfara whose salary can’t pay for a monthly Okada ride to office.
Get my drift. The best courageous leadership decisions in history, whether economic liberalisation, austerity measures, or structural adjustment, succeeded not merely because they were economically sound, but because they were accompanied by visible, credible, compassionate attention to those bearing their costs. Nigeria does not need a leader who is merely capable of announcing popular decisions. It needs a leader whose courage encompasses the full spectrum of governance challenges, including the politically dangerous work of fighting corruption among allies, reforming security institutions, and demanding accountability from power. It needs a leader whose empathy is structurally embedded in the design of policies, not attached as a palliative afterthought.
President Tinubu’s advertised courage is real in a narrow sense. He made decisions his predecessors avoided. But courage that stops at economic announcements and retreats before corruption, insecurity, and the suffering of the governed is not leadership courage. It is selective boldness, impressive in its specific application, but insufficient as a governance philosophy. Without the empathy to match it, such courage risks not becoming the bravery of a leader willing to “take the bullet for the people,” but the confidence of a leader comfortable asking the people to take the bullet for his comfort.
Therefore, for Renewed Hope to be more than a slogan, it requires both the courage to fight all of Nigeria’s enemies, including those inside, beside, adjacent and outside but closer to the Villa, and the empathy to stand, visibly and materially, with those for whom each courageous decision is not a policy construct but a daily lived hardship. Until both are present in full, what Nigeria has is not a courageous leadership.
