Tinubu's Reform Gamble: Can Nigeria's Economy Improve Before 2027 Election?

Shukurat Oyedele opens her small plastic goods shop near Offa Garage in Ilorin most mornings, even when she knows few customers will come. On the slowest days, the 43-year-old mother of four sits outside reading the Quran, waiting for someone to walk through the door. Her business was once steady. Now it is something else entirely.

A 21-litre bucket that cost 1,500 naira two years ago now sells for 3,200 naira—more than double. Her customers still want what she sells. They simply cannot afford it anymore. They check their pockets, find the money is not there, and leave empty-handed. Oyedele's profits have shrunk. Her shelves, once full, now carry fewer goods. She keeps the shop open anyway, she says, because closing it entirely feels like surrender.

Oyedele's daily struggle is also President Bola Tinubu's political problem. Nigeria will hold a presidential election in 2027, and Tinubu must convince voters that the economic pain they are living through now will eventually make their lives better. In 2023, shortly after taking office, he removed the fuel subsidy that had long propped up prices at the pump. He also reformed the foreign-exchange system, allowing the naira to trade more freely. Economists and international investors had long argued Nigeria needed these changes to fix deep structural problems in its economy. The International Monetary Fund confirmed that the reforms improved macroeconomic stability. But macroeconomic stability is not what people experience when they buy food or pay for transport. What they experience is higher prices, shrinking purchasing power, and the constant arithmetic of deciding what their families can no longer afford.

The government points to improving economic indicators as proof the reforms are working. But voters do not think in terms of GDP charts. They think in terms of what they can cook for dinner. Oyedele now makes concoction rice instead of jollof rice, adding curry to mask the difference. A lawyer named Anne Ochayi, 31, living in Makurdi, worries less about economic data and more about the armed fighters, kidnappers, and bandits who operate across Nigeria's north and Middle Belt. She travels through regions where farmer-herder violence, robbery, and kidnapping are constant threats. "We all live in fear," she told researchers. "If this issue of insecurity persists, they can't convince me to vote for them." A ride-hailing driver in Abuja named Thomas Eneji said fuel costs have made it nearly impossible for drivers to earn enough to survive. He plans to vote in 2027, hoping for a government that will make life easier. But he is skeptical that his vote will matter. "Sometimes we vote and your vote doesn't count because of one or two manipulations," he said.

Tinubu faces anger on multiple fronts—the economy, insecurity, and a broader sense that the system does not respond to ordinary people's needs. Yet his path to re-election may not depend on persuading voters that things are getting better. It may depend on something simpler: the opposition cannot unite. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and former Anambra State Governor Peter Obi are both running for president on separate platforms. Nigeria's electoral system rewards whoever consolidates the anti-incumbent vote into a single candidate. With Abubakar, Obi, and others splitting the opposition, the mathematics favor Tinubu even if his personal approval is weak.

Tinubu's ruling All Progressives Congress controls the federal government and has built one of Nigeria's most extensive political networks. The party's advantage is not popularity but organization—the ability to mobilize voters through local structures across many states. That matters because Nigerian elections are fought as much through grassroots networks as through national campaigns. Analysts note there is a risk in viewing the 2027 election purely as a referendum on Tinubu. It is also a referendum on whether Nigeria's opposition can offer voters a meaningful alternative, and whether the country's democracy is producing real choices at all.

For people like Oyedele and Eneji, the election will be judged by whether daily life improves, not by political promises or structural advantages. The question is whether Tinubu's organizational machinery and the opposition's fragmentation can overcome the weight of what ordinary Nigerians have already sacrificed, and whether they believe better days are actually coming.