IMPI credits Tinubu’s reforms for economic turnaround
The Independent Media and Policy Initiatives (IMPI) has said President Bola Tinubu has engineered a turnaround in Nigeria’s economy through what it described as tools of economic progressivism aimed at ending decades of profligacy and entrenched interests.
In a policy statement signed by its Chairman, Dr Omoniyi Akinsiju, the group argued that prior to the reforms initiated in May 2023, Nigeria’s economy was dominated by a deeply entrenched oligarchy of political elites, military officers and business magnates who controlled state resources, particularly in the oil sector.
IMPI said the pre-reform structure was sustained by patronage, fuel subsidy abuses and multiple exchange rate windows that allowed exploitation of gaps between official and parallel market rates. It added that by the time Tinubu assumed office, Nigeria was spending about 97 per cent of its total revenue on debt servicing.
The group maintained that the current administration has “taken Nigeria out of the woods,” adding that the turnaround is evident in growing fiscal stability and the loosening of what it described as the oligarchs’ stranglehold on the economy.
“To support our assertion of an ideology-based economic turnaround, we itemise some of the key tools of progressivism that the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led federal administration has deployed to accomplish the present feat. These include fiscal policy and taxation, redistributive spending, estate and wealth taxes, labour and wealth protection, monetary and financial reforms, infrastructural development, and public investment and ownership,” IMPI stated.
It explained that allocations from the Federation Account Allocation Committee in 2025 rose significantly, with the three tiers of government sharing over ₦33.27 trillion in the first eleven months, representing a 30 per cent increase over the same period in 2024. September 2025 alone recorded a distribution of ₦3.64 trillion.
On inflation, the group said the rate declined from 34.6 per cent in November 2024 to 15.10 per cent in January 2026, while food inflation dropped from 29.63 per cent in January 2025 to 8.89 per cent in January 2026, marking its first single-digit reading in more than a decade.
IMPI further noted that the gap between official and parallel foreign exchange rates had narrowed from 60 per cent to about 2 per cent, with the naira trading at approximately ₦1,349.24 to the US dollar in the official market as of February 24, 2026, and described the currency as the world’s second-best performing this year.
