Marking three years in office on Friday, President Bola Tinubu offered Nigerians a defence of the hardest stretch of his presidency, arguing that the painful reforms he imposed on taking power in 2023 had stabilised the economy and averted what he called an outright collapse. The anniversary address leaned heavily on financial markers, presenting a country that, by the numbers he chose, has turned a corner after two years of acute hardship.
The centrepiece of his case was the stock market. Tinubu said the All-Share Index had climbed from around 53,000 when he took office to a record near 250,000, with market capitalisation rising from ₦30tn to roughly ₦160tn over the same period. He paired the figures with the fate of Nigeria's fuel subsidy, the costly programme he scrapped on his first day, noting that the state had at times been spending as much as ₦18.4bn a day to sustain it and more than ₦4tn in 2022 alone.
On security, the president said the armed forces and other agencies had intensified operations against the terrorists, bandits, kidnappers and oil thieves who have made swathes of the country dangerous, and that communities and highways were gradually becoming safer. He framed the campaign as unfinished rather than won, an acknowledgment that the violence remains a daily reality across the north-west and parts of the middle belt.
That candour reflected an awkward sequencing. Only days before the anniversary, on Workers' Day, Tinubu had declared insecurity and poverty to be national emergencies, warning that the twin crises threatened jobs, productivity and the stability of the state itself. Labour leaders noted at the time that poverty now touches about 65% of Nigerians — roughly 150 million people — a figure difficult to reconcile with the triumphal tone of a record stock index.
The gap between the two messages captures the central tension of the Tinubu project. The removal of the fuel subsidy and the floating of the naira, the reforms he credits with restoring investor confidence, also drove a wave of inflation that eroded household purchasing power and hardened public anger. Supporters in the National Assembly, including senate president Godswill Akpabio, have praised the reforms as the bitter medicine that prevented a Greek-style fiscal unravelling; critics see a recovery measured in indices that ordinary Nigerians do not feel.
For investors, the macro picture has indeed improved, with public finances and external confidence firmer than at the low point of 2023. The question the anniversary left unresolved is whether the gains visible on the trading floor in Lagos will reach the markets where most Nigerians actually buy and sell, and how long a government can ask its citizens to wait for them.