By Osordi Ayomide
On October 1, 1960, Nigeria became an independent nation with a promise that the country would one day be able to determine its own destiny. Sixty-six years later, as Nigerians raise the national flag again, that promise is worth examining from another angle: what has three years of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s economic reforms actually delivered, and what price have Nigerians paid for them?
It is difficult to discuss the Tinubu administration without first discussing hardship. Since the removal of petrol subsidy in May 2023 and the subsequent foreign exchange reforms, the cost of living has changed dramatically.
Food is more expensive, transportation costs have risen, rents have become increasingly difficult for many households to meet, and petrol, once heavily subsidised, now consumes a significant portion of household and business budgets. For many Nigerians, the question is no longer whether the reforms are painful. They already know the answer. The bigger question is whether the pain is leading somewhere.
When Tinubu declared, “subsidy is gone,” his administration presented the decision as necessary to free resources for development and put an end to a system it considered unsustainable. The government has continued to defend the decision as one of the difficult steps required to rebuild the economy. But while the removal of subsidy may have changed the economics of petrol supply, it has also changed the economics of everyday Nigerian life.
There is, however, an important distinction that must not be lost in the argument. The disappearance of the notorious fuel queues does not necessarily mean the fuel problem has disappeared. Petrol is generally more available than during some of the severe scarcity periods Nigerians experienced in the past, but availability is not the same thing as affordability. A product sitting at a filling station means little to a household that has to calculate carefully before buying it.
That is why saying fuel scarcity disappeared simply because Nigerians can no longer afford to consume petrol freely would be an incomplete argument. The market itself has changed. Subsidy removal, exchange-rate movements, domestic refining capacity and changing supply patterns have all played a role. The real question is whether those changes will eventually make energy more affordable and reliable for the ordinary Nigerian.
The same question follows the economy into the classroom. Over the years, Nigerian students and universities have battled funding problems, while ASUU strikes became a recurring feature of the nation’s education system. The establishment of the Nigerian Education Loan Fund has offered a different route by allowing eligible students to access financing for their education. It is one of the administration’s more significant social interventions.
However, the scheme also raises an important question about what happens after graduation. NELFUND’s repayment structure does not require graduates to begin paying immediately; repayment starts two years after NYSC, while employed graduates repay through deductions from their salaries, with provisions for self-employed beneficiaries. The concern, therefore, should not simply be that graduates will automatically be trapped in debt. The bigger concern is whether the Nigerian economy will create enough decent and productive jobs for those graduates to earn the income required to repay their loans. In other words, education financing can solve one problem while employment becomes the next problem waiting at the door.
That same chain of questions applies to the government’s push for domestic refining. For decades, Nigeria exported crude oil only to spend scarce foreign exchange importing refined petroleum products. The emergence of large-scale domestic refining has changed that picture and created the possibility of reducing dependence on imported products. Nigerians are right to ask another question: if more petrol is refined locally, when will they begin to feel the difference?
Having a refinery does not automatically mean petrol must become cheap. Crude oil prices, exchange rates, operating expenses, transportation, taxes and market conditions still influence the final price. What matters now is how much of Nigeria’s demand domestic refineries can satisfy, the cost of that production and whether the savings from reduced import dependence are eventually reflected at the pump.
This is where the administration’s reforms face their biggest test. On paper, there are figures that the government can point to. Nigeria’s real GDP grew by 3.89 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The administration can also point to infrastructure projects, tax reforms, the new minimum wage, CNG initiatives, education financing, agricultural programmes and efforts to strengthen electricity and transportation infrastructure.
However, there is another Nigeria outside those statistics. It is the Nigeria where a worker receives a salary and immediately begins calculating food, transport, rent, school expenses and electricity. It is the Nigeria where a trader increases the price of goods because transportation has become more expensive. It is the Nigeria where a family that once ran a generator regularly now thinks twice before buying petrol.
That Nigeria does not necessarily contradict the government’s economic figures. Both realities can exist at the same time.
An economy can grow while purchasing power remains weak. Government revenue can increase while households remain under pressure. More money can reach the government and state governments without automatically translating into better living conditions for every citizen.
This is why the argument that “governors now receive more money” is not, on its own, enough to convince Nigerians that their lives have improved. The more important question is what governments at every level do with the additional resources available to them.
This brings the conversation back to the purpose of reform. The Tinubu administration did not inherit a perfect economy. It inherited years of accumulated problems: an expensive subsidy regime, foreign exchange distortions, infrastructure deficits, weak public finances and a heavy dependence on imported refined petroleum products. Some of the decisions taken by the administration were therefore not created by the crisis; they were responses to problems that had been allowed to grow for years.
This does not, however, mean Nigerians should simply be told to endure indefinitely. The popular argument that “Rome was not built in a day” is only useful when people can see that the building is actually progressing. Patience becomes much harder when citizens are asked to make sacrifices without seeing clear improvements in their daily lives.
President Tinubu himself acknowledged the difficulty of the moment in his 2025 Independence Day address, telling Nigerians that the government would continue to “fix the plumbing in our economy” while urging citizens to becomemore productive and support locally made goods. He also called for Nigerians to believe again in the possibility of a prosperous and self-reliant country. That promise is now being tested against reality.
At 66, Nigeria cannot afford to measure progress only by the number of policies announced, roads constructed, loans disbursed or economic statistics released. Those things matter, but the final measurement is closer to home: Can Nigerians eat better? Can young people find jobs? Can families afford transportation? Can businesses survive without passing every increase in operating costs to consumers? Can electricity become more reliable? Can workers save money after paying their basic expenses?
These are the questions that will determine whether the sacrifices of the last three years were worth it.
To dismiss the Tinubu administration as having achieved nothing would ignore the scale of the reforms it has undertaken. Equally, to declare that everything is working simply because some macroeconomic indicators have improved would ignore the reality confronting millions of Nigerians. The truth, as uncomfortable as it may be, sits somewhere between those two extremes.
President Tinubu has taken decisions that have significantly altered Nigeria’s economic direction, particularly in subsidy policy, foreign exchange, education financing and domestic refining. Those decisions required political will, and some of the structural problems they were designed to address had been avoided for years.
But the real reward for taking difficult decisions cannot be the difficulty itself.
Nigerians did not sacrifice so that government could simply say reforms were implemented. They sacrificed in the hope that those reforms would eventually produce something better.
As Nigeria celebrates another Independence Day, therefore, the country stands not simply at a point of celebration but at a point of assessment. Tinubu’s administration has started a reform journey whose full consequences cannot yet be known. The President deserves recognition for confronting several longstanding economic problems rather than leaving them untouched, but that recognition must remain tied to results.
Because in the end, history will not remember only that subsidy was removed, the naira was reformed, loans were created or GDP increased. It will remember what those decisions eventually did to the lives of ordinary Nigerians.
And that is the real question behind Nigeria at 66: Three years of reforms, at what cost, and ultimately, for what gain?