OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Since Bola Ahmed Tinubu took office on 29 May 2023, Nigeria has lived through a punishing economic reset whose impact has been felt not in abstract macroeconomic charts but in rent, transport fares, food prices, school fees, medicine bills and the daily arithmetic of survival. The headline numbers tell part of the story. Inflation was 21.9% in February 2023 before Tinubu assumed office, rose to 29.9% by January 2024, climbed further to 34.2% in June 2024, and only later eased in the rebased series, with the official rate around 15% by early 2026. That later easing must be read carefully, because the National Bureau of Statistics rebased the CPI basket in late 2024, meaning the lower 2025–2026 rate is not a simple return to the old price reality Nigerians endured in 2023–2024. Prices did not magically fall back; the measurement framework changed.
The foreign-exchange story is even more politically devastating because it touched the psychology of the country. In mid-2023, official references still placed the naira around the low to mid ₦400s per dollar, with one CBN-linked study citing about ₦462.9/$ in June 2023. By early 2026, CBN references were showing official exchange values in the ₦1,343 to ₦1,356/$ range. That is not a marginal adjustment. It is a severe devaluation that shredded the import dependent middle class, inflated production costs, weakened salaries, and destroyed the stored value of naira-denominated savings.
Fuel is where policy became pain. Before subsidy removal, the NBS average retail petrol price was ₦238.11 in May 2023. By January 2024 it had jumped to ₦668.30. By May 2024 it was ₦769.62. By May 2025 it had crossed ₦1,027.76, and by February 2026 the average national retail price was still above ₦1,051, even though South-West states such as Lagos and Oyo were among the cheapest in the federation at that point. This is the true chain reaction Nigerians felt: once fuel moved, transport moved; once transport moved, food moved; once food moved, wages fell behind; once wages fell behind, households began to cut protein, medication, school quality, and even mobility.
That is why it is too simplistic for defenders of the administration to point to later statistical stabilization and declare victory. A society can show improved macro signals while still being socially wounded. Nigeria’s Q4 2025 GDP growth was reported at 4.07%, and manufacturing recorded positive but modest growth, yet these top-line indicators do not erase the lived cost shock that households and small businesses absorbed after subsidy removal, exchange rate liberalization, and the resulting inflation pass-through. Growth in the abstract is not the same as relief in the market.
Now bring that national story into the South West, the region many assumed would become the flagship beneficiary of a Tinubu presidency.
In Lagos, the contradiction is stark. Lagos remains Nigeria’s commercial nerve centre, but it has also become a brutal cost of living laboratory. The state may record among the lower petrol averages in the country, yet that has not insulated residents from the wider inflationary system. Businesses still face higher logistics costs, imported input costs, rent pressure, energy costs, and weaker consumer spending. For households, the effect shows up in overstretched commuting budgets, rent escalation, and the informal tax of urban survival. The result is not prosperity but adaptation: families squeeze into smaller spaces, workers travel less, households cut consumption, and small operators survive day to day. The official fuel price may be lower in Lagos than in some northern states, but Lagos is still expensive because the broader cost structure has been repriced upward.
In Ogun and Oyo, the pressure on manufacturing and trading is harder to hide. Nigeria’s small and medium businesses remain central to employment and output: PwC, citing NBS/SMEDAN data, notes MSMEs account for 96.9% of businesses, about 46.3% of GDP, and well over four-fifths of employment. When energy, diesel, borrowing costs, rent, and imported input prices rise together, these firms do not simply “adjust”; many downsize, defer expansion, reduce staff, or disappear quietly. So when people say traders are increasing prices just to stay afloat, that is not rhetoric. It reflects a structurally squeezed real sector whose margins have been battered by macro instability.
Ondo, Osun and Ekiti face a different but related strain. These are not states cushioned by the same scale of private capital concentration as Lagos. When inflation outruns wage growth, the damage is quicker and more intimate. Salaries lose value faster, youth job creation lags, internal demand weakens, and smaller local economies contract through reduced spending. What looks from Abuja like a necessary reform sequence can feel in the provinces like a steady draining of liquidity from ordinary life. The political danger for the ruling class is that citizens may endure silently for a while, but silent endurance should never be mistaken for approval.
So the central question remains valid: what exactly is being defended? If the defense is that reforms were necessary, that is an argument. If the defense is that pain was inevitable, that too is an argument. But if the defense is that the average Nigerian is materially better off today than when Tinubu took office, the data and lived experience do not support that claim cleanly. Inflation surged dramatically through 2024, the naira lost huge value, petrol costs multiplied, and the shock filtered through virtually every layer of household existence. Even where later indicators suggest moderation, the underlying price level remains vastly higher than before the reform shock.
And while the economy has been tightening, the security crisis has remained a bleeding wound.
Across the North and Middle Belt, the scale of killings and displacement under the present administration has been severe enough to undermine any triumphalist economic narrative. Amnesty International reported in May 2025 that at least 10,217 people had been killed in two years since the government took power, including more than 6,896 in Benue and at least 2,630 in Plateau. In its Nigeria annual human rights reporting, Amnesty also documented that between December 2023 and February 2024 alone, attacks in Barkin Ladi, Bokkos and Mangu LGAs of Plateau killed 1,333 people, including 260 children. These are not isolated security breaches. They indicate sustained mass violence against civilian populations.
The displacement figures deepen the alarm. UNHCR’s Nigeria operational dashboard showed a total forcibly displaced population of 3,837,141 as of 1 March 2026. Separately, IOM’s North Central and North West Round 18 IDP Atlas reported 1,378,124 internally displaced persons and 428,969 returnees in that region as of October 2025. Amnesty’s July 2025 report on Benue described the Yelewata attack as killing more than 100 people and displacing over 3,941 others in a single incident. Once numbers reach this scale, the issue is no longer episodic insecurity. It becomes a question of state capacity, territorial control, and the moral credibility of the republic.
This is why many affected communities and observers increasingly use the phrase ethnic cleansing. Whether one adopts that label formally or not, the facts forcing the phrase into public discussion are real: repeated attacks on rural communities, recurring patterns of displacement, mass casualty events, destruction of villages, and the prolonged inability of the state to guarantee safe return or deterrence. To dismiss this as mere “background insecurity” is to normalize mass suffering. To treat it as political noise is to collaborate in collective moral numbness. Amnesty’s description of a looming humanitarian disaster in Benue was not casual advocacy language; it was a warning rooted in field observation.
The South-West should pay close attention, not because its security profile is identical to Benue or Plateau, but because no region can permanently thrive while the wider federation burns. Markets depend on national food corridors. Investment depends on confidence. Internal migration, food supply, logistics costs and political tensions do not respect geopolitical boundaries. A president may have emerged from the South West, but presidential legitimacy is national. If the economy leaves citizens poorer while insecurity leaves communities exposed, regional sentiment cannot permanently insulate federal power from eventual political reckoning.
The blunt conclusion is this: Tinubu’s presidency has delivered a historic reform shock, but not yet a historic social rescue. The state removed subsidy, liberalized foreign exchange, and demanded adjustment from the population. The population adjusted because it had no choice. That is not the same thing as national recovery. It is managed hardship. And when managed hardship coexists with mass killings, displacement and eroding public confidence, the burden of proof falls on power, not on the suffering public.
By Hon. Chima Nnadi-Oforgu
Duruebube Uzii na Abosi
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE 
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