The Calculus of Restructuring, the Asphalt State, and the Mutilated Threshold
To evaluate the third anniversary of the presidency of Bola Ahmed Tinubu is to confront one of the most disruptive economic transitions in Nigeria’s modern history.
Usually, midterm assessments of Nigerian governments follow a familiar pattern. There are the official speeches, the carefully arranged project inspections, the lists of roads commissioned and promises renewed. Governments often try to create the impression of movement even when the machinery of the state is barely moving at all.
But the current administration has broken from that tradition.
What Nigeria has witnessed over the last three years is not the slow drift that has defined much of the country’s democratic era. It is a forceful attempt to rebuild the economic structure of the state itself, no matter the political cost.
At the center of the Tinubu presidency lies a difficult paradox: a government that may have achieved one of the most consequential macroeconomic corrections in recent Nigerian history while simultaneously presiding over a severe collapse in the everyday living conditions of millions of citizens.
The contradiction defines the era.
When this administration came into office in 2023, the Nigerian state was already under immense strain. The treasury was weakened by two longstanding structural burdens: the fuel subsidy regime and the multiple exchange-rate system. Both had become deeply entrenched, expensive, and vulnerable to abuse.
The subsidy system alone consumed trillions of naira annually in a manner that many economists considered unsustainable. At the same time, the fragmented foreign exchange structure created opportunities for speculation and arbitrage that drained public resources and distorted the wider economy.
Successive governments understood the dangers of both systems, but most avoided confronting them directly because the political consequences were obvious.
Tinubu did not avoid them.
The removal of fuel subsidy was announced almost immediately after inauguration, followed later by the unification of the exchange-rate windows. It was one of the boldest economic decisions taken by any Nigerian administration in decades.
From a technocratic standpoint, the reforms produced visible results.
Fiscal leakages narrowed. Government revenues improved. Investor confidence began returning to sections of the economy. The gap between official and parallel market exchange rates reduced significantly. Foreign reserves strengthened, and the administration also pushed structural reforms around local government financial autonomy that disrupted the long-standing control many governors exercised over local allocations.
In simple terms, the government succeeded in stabilizing parts of the state that had become dangerously fragile.
But economic reforms are never experienced on spreadsheets alone. They are experienced in homes, markets, buses, pharmacies, and kitchens.
And this is where the human crisis of the moment begins.
The reforms landed on an already exhausted population with frightening speed. Fuel prices surged almost overnight. Transport fares climbed sharply. Food inflation deepened. Electricity costs rose. Rents became unbearable in many cities.
Across the country, families quietly began adjusting their lives downward.
People who once bought bags of rice began purchasing paint buckets instead. Parents started withdrawing children from private schools they could no longer afford. Many households reduced the number of meals eaten in a day. Pharmacists watched customers buy drugs tablet by tablet because full prescriptions had become impossible to afford.
For millions of Nigerians, survival became a daily calculation.
The middle class suffered one of the sharpest blows. Salaries remained mostly stagnant while the cost of living accelerated at a speed many had never experienced before. Professionals who once lived with modest stability suddenly found themselves borrowing to get through the month.
This explains the widening gap between the optimism of official economic language and the frustration visible across the country.
Government points to improving fiscal indicators, stronger reserves, and a stock market that has expanded dramatically in value. But ordinary citizens measure the economy differently. They measure it through food prices, school fees, rent, transport costs, and the ability to survive the month with dignity intact.
On paper, some of the numbers are improving. On the streets, many Nigerians simply feel poorer.
That is the political danger of the current moment.
The state may have repaired sections of its balance sheet while severely damaging the household budgets of the citizens expected to endure the transition.
Faced with this reality, the administration has increasingly turned toward the physical reconstruction of the state as both policy and political message.
This is where the idea of the Asphalt State emerges.
Across the country, the government has embarked on large-scale infrastructure projects: the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, the Sokoto-Badagry Super Highway, major road rehabilitations, and the aggressive remodelling of parts of the Federal Capital Territory.
The philosophy behind this approach is not difficult to understand. Economic reforms are abstract and often painful. But roads, bridges, rail lines, and visible construction projects create something tangible. They give citizens something they can physically see even when they cannot yet feel economic relief.
There is also a deeper political calculation at work.
Governments understand that while inflation statistics may eventually fade from public memory, concrete monuments remain. A highway cutting across a coastline becomes part of national history in a way policy documents never do.
And to the administration’s credit, there has been a visible determination to push projects through with unusual speed and executive force.
But even as roads expand and infrastructure rises, deeper structural threats remain unresolved.
Chief among them is insecurity.
Large parts of rural Nigeria remain trapped in cycles of banditry, kidnapping, and violent displacement. Farmers continue abandoning farmlands across several regions because of fear and instability. Entire communities now live with a level of insecurity that makes long-term economic planning almost impossible.
No country can build a stable modern economy while large sections of its food-producing regions remain under siege.
This is one of the administration’s greatest contradictions. The government is aggressively constructing highways to connect markets, but many of the agricultural communities expected to supply those markets remain deeply unsafe.
The administration has also introduced relief measures, including student loan programs and compressed natural gas transport initiatives. In principle, many of these interventions are sensible and potentially transformative over time.
The problem is speed.
For citizens already struggling under inflation and rising living costs, relief has often arrived too slowly to match the pace of the pain.
And politics rarely rewards delayed comfort.
As the administration crosses the third-year threshold and approaches the final stretch of its first term, the central phase of economic restructuring appears largely complete. The old subsidy-heavy order has been dismantled, and few serious observers believe Nigeria can sustainably return to the system that existed before 2023.
But structural correction alone does not guarantee political legitimacy.
A society cannot survive indefinitely on promises of future prosperity while present suffering deepens. Eventually, citizens begin demanding evidence that the sacrifice has meaning beyond economic theory.
That is now the defining challenge before this government.
The president’s political strength has always been his strategic patience and his ability to outmaneuver opposition. Those instincts helped him undertake reforms previous administrations repeatedly avoided.
But the next stage of this presidency will require something different. It will require the administration to translate macroeconomic recovery into visible human relief before exhaustion hardens into permanent resentment.
The highways may stand. The fiscal books may improve. Investors may regain confidence in the Nigerian economy.
But until ordinary Nigerians begin to feel genuine relief in their daily lives, the administration will continue to embody a difficult paradox: a government that may have repaired the structure of the state while leaving many citizens bruised, breathless, and still waiting for the dawn.
Stephanie Shaakaa
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