Nigerian leader Bola Tinubu woke up the world last week, declaring he has ended corruption in Nigeria.
But it was Nigerians who were most astounded.
He said, “The reforms I’ve embarked upon since I took over in Nigeria have been very impactful. It was initially painful, but today the result is blossoming…We have more money for the economy, and there is no more corruption.”
To cut him a little slack, he seemed to have begun by trying to affirm that he had installed a better foreign exchange regime to encourage new Brazilian investment.
I believe this to be the case because Tinubu continued as follows: “We have the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria here. You don’t have to know him before getting the foreign exchange you need. The speculators are out. In our currency market, the door is open for businesses.”
The problem is that his comments, which were even true of the foreign exchange sector, went way beyond it.
The video of the speech shows Tinubu as affirming, “No more corruption,” although some news outlets, including Premium Times and The Punch, quoted him as saying, “There will be no more corruption.”
Foreigners with absolutely no experience of Nigeria may have been swept away by the Nigerian leader’s speech to have hurried to Nigeria to start investing.
The question is how many Nigerians, including those in his own government and on his delegation, believed one word of what he said.
Has Nigeria experienced a C-change, or sea-change, in the past two years? The answer is clearly, No.
In 2015, his APC took control of the federal government by hawking a C-Change message: to Change Nigeria by Cleaning it of Corruption. Here is the official APC Manifesto, perhaps the most dishonest in the history of political chicanery, as recorded by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
Dismissing the PDP, the party it desired to replace, APC declared: “The consequence of trusting (sic) power to a party that does not have the genuine interest of Nigeria and Nigerians are clearly manifest in our political and economic predicament today; tens of thousands of innocent Nigerians have been killed due to government neglect of security; poverty and unemployment have multiplied due to the perverse economic policies, corruption has been taken to new levels while health, education and job opportunities are all in free falls, the question on the lips of most Nigerians is: is there a federal government in Nigeria? Yes, there is a federal government in Nigeria. A government that thrives on chaos, corruption, impunity, injustice and the systematic exploitation of ethnicity, religious sentiments and other primal instincts to divide and rule Nigeria. It is no wonder that at no time since the period of the Civil War have ethnic and regional sentiments been as raw as they currently are. Nigeria can, and must do better.”
We must read The Manifesto because we know that APC lacks the honour to do so, just as it has in the past 10 years, failed to honour even one of the myriads of contracts it marketed to the Nigerian electorate in 2015, selling a phantom weapon it called “APC Commonsense Solutions.”
There are many areas to look at; I will examine four. On corruption, APC’s Commonsense Solutions pledged to:
Create a functionally independent anti-corruption agency, with adequate and predictable funding and full prosecutorial powers and free from political interference; End immunity from prosecution for sitting politicians; Reform budgetary & accounting procedures-including publishing all the meeting-minutes and service performance data on government spending [of] over N100 million at Federal and State and N10 million in local government; and End all private jet and First Class foreign travel for government employees.
On education in 2025, APC pledged to “Triple education spending over the next 10 years, from the current… to 24.5%.”
At that time, the PDP had for five straight years spent between 7.95% and 9.26% of the budget per annum on education, but in the Muhammadu Buhari Years, the APC downgraded education year after year: from 6.65% in 2016 to 4.30% in 2022. Tinubu, for his part, allocated 5.53% in 2024 and 7.3% in 2025; these are the lowest levels internationally.
On unemployment, it promised: “3 million new jobs a year through public works programme.” This means that it now owes Nigerians some 30 million jobs.
On insecurity, the APC in 2015 accused its predecessor of lacking a vision. “And without a vision, that party at the centre has led Nigeria from one crisis to another, lurching deeper into political anarchy, economic decline and social disillusionment. A decade and a half later, nothing has changed. That ruling party has neither concrete plans for the security and advancement of Nigerians, nor the wherewithal to do so, even if it had one. Suffice to say that it had thrived on the maxim: promise nothing, do nothing.”
When Tinubu celebrates his reforms, it is important to remember that, unlike APC, which was feasting on the PDP, the ruling party is not feasting on itself, but on Nigerians.
Thus, there is no truth to either of Tinubu’s claims that his reforms were only “initially painful” or that there is no more corruption.
To suggest that Nigerians are not in pain is to confirm that the Nigerian leader is not leading Nigeria.
Real Nigerians are in pain because, contrary to the claims that he makes abroad, but curiously not at home, the ruling party has abandoned them. His leadership is limited, narrow-minded, and deliberately ignores the general hardship.
There are more government lies about jobs than there are jobs, as the June 2025 Afrobarometer report clarifies. There are about 80 million people, roughly one-third of the population, classified as living in poverty, a large portion of whom are young adults who are either unemployed or lack the necessary skills. This is far short of the APC’s promise of 30 million jobs.
For them, there is no sight of the 24.5% spending on education that the APC promised 10 years ago.
Finally, contrary to the claim that corruption has been abolished or is under some sort of control, it is on a fierce rampage because there is nothing in the behaviour of the ruling party, since 2023, to suggest that honour and integrity are of any importance.
Every year, for instance, the Auditor-General of the Federation routinely issues his obligatory annual report; it is also routinely ignored by the executive, thereby encouraging corruption to fester. The latest report, for 2021, is available. But responding to the 2019 and 2020 reports, the House of Representatives, itself no model of patriotism, recently indicted 31 federal MDAs for N103.8 billion and $950,912.05 worth of financial infractions.
Who will recover the monies and jail the thieves, the Tinubu government?
What of the even more ethically-challenged but powerfully-placed Nigerians, such as Godswill Akpabio, the President of the Senate, or Nyesom Wike, the Minister of the FCT, whom Tinubu recently claimed he would probe?
Corruption is not fundamentally about money, but about how things are done, and Tinubu’s “Fight-Snatch-Grab” political philosophy is perhaps the best illustration of the scourge.
It is not simply that corruption in Nigeria, like insecurity, has gone away. Under APC, it is alive. And mutating.
By Sonala Olumhense
