President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has declared that Nigeria has moved beyond the most difficult phase of his administration’s economic reforms, using his 66th Independence Day address to rally Nigerians behind a new national mission: production, enterprise, and the global sale of Nigerian goods.
Speaking Thursday in a nationwide broadcast themed “From Reform to Prosperity,” Tinubu said the country had “passed through its own Red Sea” and that the “emergency treatment” phase of the economy was over. “The central economic task before us has changed,” he said. “For three years, our overriding purpose was to correct our nation’s course. Now, our purpose is simple: shared and widespread prosperity”.
The President devoted a substantial portion of the address to defending the reforms that defined his first years in office, chiefly the removal of petrol subsidies and the unification of the naira exchange rate, acknowledging their severity while insisting they were necessary. He compared Nigeria’s pre-2023 economy to a cancer patient offered only morphine: “For too long, Nigeria’s leaders chose morphine while praying for a miracle that never came”. “Our reforms did not create the weaknesses in our economy. They confronted them”.
With the reform phase behind him, Tinubu pivoted to what he called the “age of prosperity,” placing jobs, industrial growth, and local production at the centre of his government’s next chapter. He issued a direct call to Nigerians to manufacture, farm, and export:
“I want to see more Nigerians making things. I want to see more Nigerian farms feeding our cities and supplying our factories. I want to see Nigerian businesses selling Nigerian goods to the whole world. I want young Nigerians building unicorns and creating opportunities for others here at home”.
- To enable that vision, Tinubu outlined measures aimed at lowering the cost of producing and moving goods: expanded mechanised irrigation and dry-season farming, improved access to seeds and fertiliser, and investment in roads, railways, and ports connecting farms and factories to markets. He cited economic growth of more than four per cent in 2026, a substantial decline in inflation from its peak, rebuilt foreign reserves, and more than $6 billion in non-oil export revenue in 2025 as evidence that the reforms were yielding results.
The President also acknowledged that millions of Nigerians continue to struggle with food, school fees, medical bills, and transportation costs, but said their difficulties “did not begin with the reforms of the last three years” and were the accumulated consequence of decades of low productivity and failed institutions. He pointed to programmes such as the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, CREDICORP consumer credit, and an expanded National Social Register as bridges toward prosperity, not substitutes for it.
“The age of reform has done its work,” Tinubu concluded. “Now begins the age of prosperity”.