11/04/2026
TINUBU DESERVES A SECOND TERM
By Eneojo Herbert Idakwo
An RTIFN Special feature
Why history may remember Bola Ahmed Tinubu not as the president who chose comfort, but as the one who chose correction.
There are moments in the life of a nation when leadership is no longer about applause, popularity, or even immediate comfort. It becomes about nerve. About who is willing to walk into a burning house of distortions, vested interests, and inherited lies and begin, brick by painful brick, to rebuild it.
Nigeria arrived at such a moment in 2023.
For years, the country had drifted between promise and paralysis, rich in resources yet poor in structure, loud in politics yet weak in governance. It had become a place where sentiment often triumphed over substance, where ethnic arithmetic masqueraded as nation-building, where religious passions were stirred for electoral gain, and where elite coalitions fed fat on a broken order while preaching sacrifice to ordinary citizens. The result was predictable: a fragile economy, a disillusioned populace, and a republic trapped in the expensive theatre of postponing hard truth.
Then Bola Ahmed Tinubu took office.
What followed was not the familiar choreography of Nigerian politics, where presidents speak boldly and govern timidly. Tinubu did not begin by soothing entrenched interests. He began by confronting them. He moved against fuel subsidy. He pushed exchange rate reforms. He signaled that the era of pretending that Nigeria could endlessly finance inefficiency, reward rent-seeking, and survive on borrowed illusions had to end.
It was audacious. It was disruptive. It was painful.
And it may yet prove necessary.
The Day Comfort Ended
Every serious reform begins by offending someone.
In Nigeria, reform offends many people because too many people benefit from disorder. For decades, the state was managed in a way that made waste look like policy and distortion look like compassion. Subsidies became sacred even when they were riddled with leakages. Economic inefficiencies were preserved because they served networks of patronage. A system of multiple advantages for the connected elite was maintained in the name of national stability.
But stability built on denial is only delayed collapse.
Tinubu’s earliest steps in office were therefore more than policy decisions. They were acts of political confrontation. He targeted the pressure points of a system that had grown comfortable with evasion. He chose to disturb an arrangement that previous administrations had often tiptoed around, negotiated with, or simply inherited without courage to challenge.
That is the essential fact of his presidency. Whatever one thinks of his style, one cannot honestly accuse him of caution in the face of structural decay.
He did not arrive to manage the old order more elegantly. He arrived to alter its foundations.
Reform Is the Only Honest Road
The central question before Nigeria is simple: can a country be healed without reform?
The answer is no.
No nation can permanently subsidise dysfunction and expect growth. No economy can distort its currency, protect unproductive habits, underinvest in public goods, and still become competitive. No political class can keep recycling ethnic anxieties and religious loyalties while neglecting the hard work of institution-building and expect a modern state to emerge.
The path to a better Nigeria is reform.
Not slogans. Not selective outrage. Not sentimental populism. Reform.
This is what makes Tinubu’s first term consequential. He has, in substance, told Nigerians an uncomfortable truth: the old model is dead. The country cannot continue to run on illusions while demanding prosperity. It cannot sustain a culture where sacrifice is always demanded of the poor but accountability is rarely demanded of the powerful. It cannot keep pretending that patronage is development or that political balancing is the same thing as nation-building.
Reform, by its nature, is disruptive because it drags hidden costs into daylight. It reveals who truly benefits from disorder. It exposes the difference between those who want change and those who merely want access to the machinery of the old system.
That is why the backlash has been so fierce.
The Politics of Pretence
Nigeria’s political elite have perfected one craft above all others: reinvention.
When they are in power, they defend the system. When they are out of power, they discover the people. When they benefit from distorted structures, they call it pragmatism. When they lose access to those same structures, they call it oppression. Their loyalty is rarely to reform. It is usually to relevance.
This is the hypocrisy Nigerians must learn to read more clearly.
Too often, those who helped build or preserve the very dysfunctions now lamented in public suddenly become the loudest voices of moral outrage once they are excluded from the centre of power. They speak the language of the masses, but their record tells another story. They present themselves as protectors of the suffering, but their politics is often rooted in the preservation of elite advantage.
This is not to say every critic of Tinubu is dishonest. It would be foolish to make such a claim. The pain Nigerians are experiencing is real. The hardship is not imagined. The anger in many homes is legitimate.
But there is a difference between sincere concern and opportunistic theatre.
Nigeria must not confuse the two.
Beyond Tribe, Beyond Creed
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Nigeria’s democratic journey is that too many critical national questions are still filtered through the shallow lenses of tribe and religion.
Who gets power? Whose turn is it? Which region is favoured? Which faith feels represented? Which bloc has been compensated?
These are the questions that keep the republic emotionally charged and structurally stagnant.
A serious country asks different questions. What policies create productivity? What institutions endure beyond personalities? What reforms improve education, power, taxation, security, and investment? What kind of economic architecture can carry millions out of poverty? What kind of political culture punishes incompetence instead of rewarding familiarity?
Tinubu’s presidency, for all its imperfections, has forced the national conversation closer to those harder questions. Whether in fiscal policy, taxation, energy, or macroeconomic restructuring, the emphasis has shifted from symbolic balancing to systemic adjustment. That shift matters. It is uncomfortable, yes, but it is necessary if Nigeria is ever to become a country governed less by identity bargaining and more by functional statecraft.
The old configuration of Nigeria remains tilted toward ethnic and religious gains because that tilt serves entrenched interests. It allows political actors to mobilise passion instead of producing results. It allows underperformance to hide beneath identity solidarity. It allows failure to be excused as persecution.
Reform threatens that arrangement because reform is impersonal. It asks what works, what leaks, what grows, what collapses, and who is accountable.
And accountability has never been the preferred language of the political elite.
The Cost of Courage
No honest feature on Tinubu can avoid the human reality of this moment.
Reform has not been painless. It has hurt. Prices have risen. Families have been squeezed. Small businesses have struggled to adjust. Anxiety has spread through markets, homes, and workplaces. Many Nigerians do not experience reform as an abstract policy victory. They experience it in transport fares, food costs, rent, school fees, and daily survival.
This pain should not be dismissed, minimised, or romanticised.
A government that asks people to endure hardship must also show empathy, discipline, and visible effort to cushion the burden. Reform without humane governance risks sounding like arithmetic without soul. Any fair assessment of Tinubu’s presidency must therefore acknowledge that the moral credibility of reform depends not only on its logic, but also on how justly the transition is managed.
Yet even here, Nigeria must resist the temptation of false choices.
The existence of pain does not automatically invalidate the necessity of reform. Sometimes the pain is evidence of how long reality has been delayed. Sometimes the discomfort of correction is the price paid for years of avoidance. Sometimes what looks harsh in the short term is precisely what prevents catastrophe in the long term.
The real debate, then, is not whether the road is hard. It clearly is. The real debate is whether Nigeria should retreat into the very habits that produced the crisis in the first place.
Why a Second Term Matters
First terms often begin reform. Second terms determine whether reform survives.
This is where the Tinubu argument becomes strongest.
Structural change is not magic. It is a sequence. It requires time, continuity, institutional discipline, and political stamina. Tax reform needs time to mature. Energy reform needs time to stabilize. Fiscal repair needs time to deepen. Investment confidence needs time to settle. Administrative overhauls need time to move from presidential intention to bureaucratic reality.
If Nigeria interrupts every difficult reform cycle before it takes root, then the country condemns itself to permanent transition and permanent underperformance. It becomes a nation forever beginning, never arriving. Forever diagnosing, never healing. Forever angry, never transformed.
That is why the question of Tinubu’s second term is larger than one man. It is really a question about whether Nigeria is prepared to stay with a serious course of restructuring even when the journey is uncomfortable. It is a referendum on whether the republic wants cure or merely relief.
Relief is politically attractive. Cure is historically valuable.
Nigeria has had enough of leaders who administer relief while preserving the disease.
The Measure of This Presidency
Tinubu should not be judged by chants or counter-chants, nor by the noise of a political class that often treats the nation as spoils. He should be judged by whether he confronted the structural evasions that held Nigeria back. On that score, he has made a case stronger than many are willing to admit.
He has shown a willingness to make politically costly choices. He has signaled that governance must be more than coalition management. He has pushed the country toward a harder but more honest conversation about how nations are actually built.
That does not make him infallible. It does not place his administration above scrutiny. It does not erase public suffering or silence legitimate criticism. Democracy demands criticism. Reform itself becomes stronger when it is refined by truth.
But criticism must also be serious. It must rise above opportunism, beyond the cynical habits of those who only discover the poor when they lose office. It must resist the seductions of tribal applause and religious sentiment. And it must answer one difficult question with honesty: if not reform, then what?
What alternative is being offered? A return to subsidy illusions? A restoration of elite bargains? Another season of emotional politics wrapped in the language of rescue?
Nigeria has seen that movie before. It always ends the same way.
A Republic at the Crossroads
There comes a point in every nation’s story when it must decide whether it wants to be governed by truth or comfort.
Truth is harder. It strips away excuses. It demands reform, sacrifice, patience, and accountability. Comfort is easier. It tells people what they want to hear. It flatters old prejudices. It shields entrenched interests. It postpones reckoning while calling the delay compassion.
Nigeria now stands between those two instincts.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s first term has been defined by a willingness to choose truth over comfort, correction over cosmetics, structure over sentiment. That choice has come with political cost and public pain. But it has also broken the old rhythm of evasive governance.
And that is why he deserves a second term.
Not because the journey is complete. It is not.
Not because Nigerians are not hurting. They are.
Not because his government should escape criticism. It should not.
He deserves a second term because he has done what too many before him feared to do: he has touched the foundation of the problem. He has challenged the expensive myths on which Nigerian dysfunction has long survived. He has forced the nation to confront the difference between popularity and leadership.
History is rarely kind to those who merely preserve a broken inheritance. It remembers, more often, those who dared to repair it.
If Nigeria is serious about becoming more than a theatre of ethnic bargains, religious mobilisations, and elite reinvention, then it must learn to reward not only rhetoric, but resolve.
The future will not be built by those who speak most tenderly about the masses after leaving power. It will be built by those willing to dismantle the machinery that kept the masses trapped in the first place.
That is the truest case for continuity.
That is the strongest case for courage.
That is why, in this defining hour of national reckoning, Tinubu deserves a second term.
