Tinubu Wants Four More Years of Pain From Nigerians

Saturday, Bola Tinubu stood before a crowd and asked Nigerians for four more years. Ask yourself what those years have cost. A mother who once bought a week of groceries with her salary now buys three days. A student who once paid school fees by saving for a year now borrows from relatives who are also drowning. A small trader who once priced goods in naira can no longer price anything, because the number changes before the customer leaves the shop. Tinubu wants a second term. We have to ask whether the first one gave us anything worth renewing.

Consider what happened after he took office in May 2023. Within days, his government removed the fuel subsidy, and pump prices roughly doubled overnight. Then it unified the foreign exchange market, and the naira, which had traded around 460 to the dollar, slid past 1,500 within months. That is a loss of roughly seventy percent of its value. Inflation climbed past 30 percent, and food inflation was worse, because Nigeria imports much of what it eats and must now pay for it in a currency that has been hollowed out. Reforms may be necessary in principle. But reform that arrives without a safety net, without transparency about what the savings will buy, and without a plan to widen the tax base is not reform. It is a transfer of pain from the state to the household.

The National Bureau of Statistics has reported that roughly 133 million Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty. That is more than half the population of a country of over 200 million people. Read that again and let it sit. More than half of the largest economy in Africa is poor by the government's own measure. In August 2024, when young Nigerians took to the streets under the #EndBadGovernance banner, Amnesty International documented more than twenty protesters killed by security forces. Those were not thugs. They were students, workers, and the unemployed, asking for food and dignity, and they were answered with bullets. A government that shoots its youth for asking for bread has lost the moral right to ask those same youths for their votes.

Now look at the opposition. Nigerians deserve a serious challenge to the ruling party, the kind that offers a credible alternative on the economy, on security, and on the institutions that decide who wins elections. Instead, the opposition is fractured, with rival coalitions, bitter personal rivalries, and candidates who spent the last cycle fighting each other in court rather than building a platform. The 2023 election itself left a lasting wound. Many Nigerians still believe the result was shaped by irregularities and a vote-counting process that failed to inspire confidence. The courts upheld Tinubu's victory, and the law is the law. But the law can only restore legitimacy when the process that produced the result is trusted. Too many citizens do not trust it. That is the real crisis hiding beneath the economic one.

Let us be honest about the bigger picture, because Nigeria is not alone. Across the continent, leaders are discovering that the easiest way to win a second term is to make voters feel that the state is protecting them, while quietly making them poorer. We have watched it in Zimbabwe, in Ethiopia, in Uganda, and in too many capitals where elections are staged for foreign observers and then ignored by the men in power. The pattern is always the same: a crisis is blamed on inherited mess, a few symbolic gestures are offered, and the bill is handed to people who never signed the contract. Nigeria matters because its size makes it a test. If Africa's most populous nation can sustain a democracy where the economy is in freefall and the opposition cannot agree on who should challenge the incumbent, the rest of the continent will learn that elections are a ritual, not a choice.

So what should Nigeria do? The answer is not a slogan. It is a set of institutions and habits that actually work. Start with the Independent National Electoral Commission. It must be funded fully, insulated from political pressure, and held to published, verifiable results at every polling unit. Every ballot should be traceable. Every complaint should be heard quickly by courts that are truly independent. Nigeria has the legal framework for credible elections. What it lacks is the political will to enforce it. Next, the economy must be governed by rules, not improvisation. Tax reform should widen the base by taxing wealth, property, and the informal economy fairly, instead of squeezing the salaried worker who already pays through the nose. Subsidy removal, if it is to continue, must be accompanied by targeted cash transfers that reach real households, verified and published, so citizens can see where their money goes.

Look at what the continent has already proven. Botswana built one of Africa's most stable democracies on diamonds, by insisting on transparent management of its mineral wealth, independent institutions, and a commitment to the rule of law that has survived every election for decades. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and services hub by protecting property rights, keeping its courts independent, and welcoming competition. Senegal showed in 2024 that a peaceful transfer of power is possible even after a bitter contest, when its courts and its people refused to let a leader cling to office. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that better is possible when institutions outrank personalities. Nigeria has the talent, the entrepreneurs, the universities, and the civil society to do the same. What it needs is a government that treats accountability as a duty, not a threat.

That brings us to what Nigerian citizens must demand, starting now, before the ballots are printed. Demand a published plan with numbers, not adjectives: inflation targets, unemployment figures, electricity hours, the cost of a bag of rice. Demand that every naira of public money be audited and that the audits be public. Demand an electoral process where results are posted at the polling unit, where observers are free to work, and where no official can hide behind a technicality. Demand that the opposition stop cannibalizing itself and present a single credible alternative with a policy agenda that voters can read and hold them to. And demand that the security forces be reminded that the Nigerian constitution protects the right to protest, not the right to shoot protesters.

Nigerians are not asking for miracles. They are asking for a government that counts its citizens as human beings and not as line items in a budget that never reaches them. Four more years of this would deepen the hunger, the debt, and the despair of a generation that has already been asked to sacrifice enough. The election in January is not a formality. It is a referendum on whether Nigeria will be governed by institutions or by excuses. Use your voice. Register. Verify your polling unit. Watch the count. Refuse to let anyone tell you that poverty is the price of stability, because it is not. Stability is what you get when the state keeps its promises. Make them keep theirs.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL