By Musa Bakare.
Nigeria’s moment has arrived, not to manage administrative failure, indolence and decline, but to decisively break from it.
President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s eight years in office, from 2023 to 2031, will be remembered not as a routine tenure but as a national reckoning. He did not assume office to comfort entrenched habits or preserve illusions. He came to correct them.
Decades of subsidies without productivity, politics without consequence, and governance without courage demanded a brutal end. The removal of fuel subsidy was not merely a policy choice; it was surgery, painful, necessary, and long overdue.
Tinubu administration is governance stripped to its essentials: state realism, fiscal truth, and sovereignty reclaimed through discipline. Exchange rate unification and revenue reform are not experiments or ideological whims. They are instruments deployed against generational decay and economic self deception.
History is clear: all genuine reforms hurt. Post war Europe rebuilt through sacrifice. Rising Asia endured austerity before prosperity. Nigeria is no exception. Reform without time is fragile. Eight years provide the depth reforms require to take root. Anything less risks relapse into the familiar cycle of weakness and dependency, God forbid.
President Tinubu’s politics rejects appeasement. His focus is not headlines but foundations. Infrastructure, energy security, industrial revival, and national integration are treated not as slogans but as tools of statecraft.
For the youth, entitlement is being replaced with enterprise. For the nation’s future, stability is chosen over stagnation, order over improvisation.
Opposition voices shout from the present, magnifying transitional discomforts and weaponizing inevitable errors. But history does not adjudicate from the noise of the moment; it listens from tomorrow.
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s eight years represents Nigeria’s narrow but decisive window to choose discipline over delusion and reform over retreat. He will not ultimately be judged by polls or protests, but by outcomes, by whether Nigeria emerges stronger, more governed, and fully awake to its destiny.
– Musa Asiru Bakare, a foundational member of the APC and political analyst, writes from Lokoja, Kogi State.
