Nigeria’s political economy has been characterised by successive cycles of reform ambition and structural inertia, producing a development paradox in which abundant natural resources coexist with deepening fiscal vulnerability, currency instability, and sluggish growth. The inauguration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in May 2023 inaugurated an administration that, within its first two years, undertook a cluster of bold macroeconomic interventions widely regarded as the most structurally significant since civilian rule was restored in 1999. This paper critically evaluates the Tinubu administration’s reform agenda, centred on the abolition of petrol subsidies, the unification of multiple foreign exchange windows, expansion of non-oil revenue, and the restructuring of Nigeria’s debt service burden, within a comparative presidential framework that benchmarks these interventions against the tenures of Olusegun Obasanjo (1999–2007), Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (2007–2010), Goodluck Jonathan (2010–2015), and Muhammadu Buhari (2015–2023). Drawing on publicly available macroeconomic data from the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Reuters, the paper applies a political economy lens informed by institutional reform theory, fiscal federalism, and developmental state frameworks. Findings indicate that while the Tinubu reforms generate measurable short-term hardship through inflation and currency depreciation, they represent a structurally superior reform posture relative to all preceding democratic administrations, shifting Nigeria toward a diversified, reform-driven growth trajectory for the first time in the democratic era. The paper concludes with policy implications for sub-Saharan African states navigating analogous resource-curse dynamics and reform-resistance pressures, contributing to broader scholarly debates on transformative leadership, developmental governance, and political economy in emerging markets.
Keywords: structural reforms, political economy, fiscal federalism, Nigeria, macroeconomic stabilisation, petrol subsidy, foreign exchange unification, developmental governance, sub-Saharan Africa, presidential comparative analysis
