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| Oyo State Governor — Seyi Makinde |
In a sharply worded newsletter released on Thursday, Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde delivered one of his most structured critiques yet of President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms, arguing that leadership must be judged not by improved macroeconomic indicators alone but by whether ordinary Nigerians can survive the transition. At the heart of his message is a blunt democratic proposition: one presidential term is enough for citizens to assess a leader’s priorities and decide whether that government deserves another mandate.
“And if, after four years, a leader has not been able to make those choices work for the people, Nigerians have every right to say: let us try someone else,” Makinde wrote. The statement lands with particular force because Makinde is not speaking solely as a state governor. He is the presidential candidate of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) for the 2027 elections and has repeatedly pledged that, if elected, he would serve only a single four-year term as head of a transitional government of national unity.
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Priorities Reveal Priorities
Makinde framed governance as a sequence of deliberate choices under scarcity. “Policies tell you what a government wants to change. The order in which it chooses to make those changes tells you how that government thinks,” he said. “There are never enough resources for government to meet every need at once. So, leadership is about what you choose to do first, what you are prepared to postpone, and who bears the cost of those choices.”
He contrasted this philosophy with his own record in Oyo State since taking office in 2019. His administration, he noted, prioritised the consistent payment of workers’ salaries, the regularisation of pension payments, and the clearing of inherited gratuity arrears even while pursuing infrastructure development. Personnel costs alone absorbed roughly 70 percent of the state’s federal receipts in the early years. Rather than force a binary choice between paying people and building roads, the government pursued both.
To fund capital projects without starving recurrent obligations, Oyo deployed the Alternative Project Funding Approach (APFA). Under this model, contractors finance selected infrastructure projects upfront and the state repays them over an agreed period—often 12 to 30 months. The approach has underpinned major road works, including the reconstruction of the 65-kilometre Moniya-Iseyin road that significantly shortened travel time between Ibadan and the Oke-Ogun zone, as well as other zonal linkages and urban networks.
Independent assessments and state data credit the administration with constructing or rehabilitating hundreds of kilometres of roads—more, some analysts claim, than previous administrations combined between 1999 and 2019—while spreading projects across the state’s five zones rather than concentrating them in the capital.
On the welfare side, Oyo has maintained prompt salary payments (reportedly over ₦18 billion monthly in recent figures), introduced a 13th-month salary, effected multiple salary reviews, and steadily increased gratuity allocations—from an initial ₦500 million monthly toward ₦3 billion annually in later years—to clear long-standing arrears affecting thousands of retirees. The state also expanded teacher and health-worker recruitment and invested in basic education infrastructure and primary healthcare centres.
Makinde presented this as evidence of a clear ordering of priorities: meet obligations to workers and pensioners first, accept the fiscal cost, and still deliver infrastructure through creative financing. “Going back to our test of leadership, you can see clearly what we chose to do first – meet our obligations. And we accepted the fiscal cost of that choice,” he wrote.
The Federal Reform Debate: Numbers Versus Livelihoods
Turning to the national level, Makinde acknowledged the economic logic behind the removal of the petrol subsidy and the adoption of a more flexible foreign-exchange regime in 2023. Both policies had long been recommended by economists and international institutions as necessary to end fiscal distortions, curb rent-seeking, and attract investment. Yet he insisted that the human cost of the transition cannot be sidelined.
“Reform is not only about fixing the numbers. It is also about how people survive the transition,” he argued. He cited a rise in the poverty rate from about 56 percent in 2023 to around 62 percent in 2026, equating to roughly 23 million additional Nigerians living in poverty. “These 23 million are not just numbers. They are our parents, neighbours, friends and children. Macroeconomic stability has not translated at the same pace into jobs, lower poverty and improved living standards for the majority of Nigerians,” he said. “That is part of the scorecard the Federal Government must own.”
World Bank data broadly supports the trajectory Makinde describes. Poverty under the national line rose from around 40 percent in 2019 to 56.2 percent in 2023 and was estimated at approximately 63 percent in 2025–2026, with projections of only gradual decline thereafter even as macroeconomic conditions stabilise. Multidimensional poverty metrics and food insecurity indicators have similarly worsened for large segments of the population, particularly in the North. Inflation peaked near 35 percent before easing, transport and food costs surged after the subsidy removal (petrol prices rising from roughly ₦185 per litre to well over ₦1,000 in many locations), and the naira depreciated sharply following the float.
The Tinubu administration and its supporters counter that the reforms averted a deeper crisis.
Official figures claim the combined effect of subsidy removal and foreign-exchange unification generated about ₦15.8 trillion in additional resources for the Federation between mid-2023 and the end of 2025, with the bulk flowing to states and local governments. External reserves have shown periods of recovery, the official-parallel market exchange-rate premium has narrowed dramatically, and the government points to infrastructure spending, wage adjustments, and debt management as tangible uses of the fiscal space created. Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele has repeatedly warned that reinstating the subsidy would risk pushing petrol toward ₦2,000 per litre and the exchange rate toward ₦3,000 to the dollar, while reversing hard-won stabilisation gains.
Independent analyses, however, consistently highlight the incomplete transmission of macroeconomic gains into household welfare. Weak job creation, low agricultural productivity, high inequality, and the delayed impact of social protection measures have left poverty elevated even as headline inflation has moderated and growth has shown modest recovery. This gap between stabilised numbers and lived hardship forms the core of Makinde’s critique—and of broader opposition messaging ahead of 2027.
One Term as a Test of Seriousness
Makinde tied his argument to a larger institutional proposal. He has long advocated for shorter, more focused tenures that reduce the distractions of perpetual campaigning. In 2025 he floated the idea of a single five- or six-year term for elected officials.
As APM candidate he has gone further, pledging that any administration he leads would last only four years and function as an inclusive transitional government of national unity—mirroring a similar commitment by Labour Party/NDC figure Peter Obi.
In the newsletter he argued that a single term can be sufficient to drive measurable change across key sectors if the government enters office with a clear, time-bound agenda and transparent metrics. His own proposed programme, he said, would specify what citizens should expect in the first three years and how progress would be assessed. The next election, therefore, is less about personality and more about competing philosophies of leadership: “Do you agree with how this government is thinking? Are you satisfied with what it has chosen to prioritise?”
He closed with a practical call: eligible Nigerians should obtain their Permanent Voter Cards and participate. In a political environment where incumbency advantages, regional power-sharing expectations, and economic pain all shape voter calculations, Makinde is attempting to reframe 2027 as an explicit referendum on results rather than rhetoric.
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Broader Context and Open Questions
Makinde’s intervention fits a pattern of escalating opposition criticism of the 2023 reforms. Similar arguments have come from Atiku Abubakar’s camp and other opposition voices who ask, in essence, where the promised prosperity is for households that can no longer afford three meals a day. APC defenders, including the Oyo State chapter, have dismissed such critiques as politically motivated and pointed to increased FAAC allocations that have benefited state governments—including Oyo—while questioning whether Makinde has maximised the state’s own opportunities.
The deeper tension remains unresolved. Structural reforms that correct long-standing distortions almost always impose short-to-medium-term pain. The question is whether the sequencing, cushioning, and communication of those reforms adequately protect the ability of citizens “to live, work and produce while we make that change,” as Makinde put it. His Oyo record offers one model of prioritising immediate human obligations alongside infrastructure. The federal experience since 2023 offers another of prioritising fiscal and monetary correction first.
Whether Nigerians ultimately judge the Tinubu administration by the stabilisation of key indicators or by the 20-plus million people added to the poverty rolls will be decided at the ballot box in 2027. Makinde’s newsletter makes the case that four years is a fair and sufficient period in which to make that judgment—and that citizens retain the sovereign right to demand a different approach if the current one has not worked for them.
Samuel O. Sulaimon is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Naijapiz. He covers News, Sports, Finance, Faiths, Education, Politics and Technology.
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