In my Tribune article of February 2024, I wrote that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu might yet become the most consequential president in Nigeria’s history. More than two years later, that possibility now sits uneasily beside the harsh realities of the Nigerian condition. Across the country, millions of Nigerians are angry, exhausted and disillusioned. The cost of living has become unbearable for many families. Insecurity continues to stalk communities with the arrogance of a relentless, conquering army. Poverty has eaten deep into the dignity of citizens. For many Nigerians, the question is not whether Tinubu can be great. The more immediate question is whether the Nigerian state itself can still be made to work.
That is precisely why this argument must be made again, but with greater urgency. Tinubu does not have to be loved to be historically consequential. He does not even have to be widely popular in this moment. History is not always kind to leaders who merely manage decline with soothing speeches and palliatives. It remembers those who confront the central contradiction of their time. For Tinubu, that contradiction is in plain sight. Nigeria is too centralised, too suffocated, too structurally dishonest, and too violently misaligned with the realities of its peoples. No president can police, command, feed, educate and morally hold together this vast country from Abuja as if Nigeria were one oversized local government.
In that 2024 article, I argued: “Mr Tinubu has the singular, and almost last chance opportunity to restructure this unwieldy behemoth called Nigeria. No amount of patchwork can fix this lumbering giant that has become a self-ravaging monstrosity. Restructure this country, and unleash its true potentials. Continue the whitewash and hasten unmitigated disaster, for which the present reality is but child’s play. Nigeria is an unwieldy agglomeration of wildly different cultures and nations, vastly different history, and, I dare say, different expectations and aspirations. It has all the great recipes for a dream (confederation) and, in the same breadth, all the ingredient for a nightmare union. Free up the constituent nations, and then they can work together in productive partnership.”
I stand by those words. If anything, the urgency behind them has grown sharper. What was then a warning now feels closer to a national summons. Tinubu has shown, through his economic reforms, that he is capable of taking decisions that many Nigerian leaders before him preferred to postpone. Many may disagree, as I have done, with the sequencing, the cushioning, the communication, the human sensitivity and even the wisdom of some of those decisions within a broader economic and governance strategy. But you have to agree that he was willing to take the political risk, or so it appears. The real question, therefore, is this: will he spend that appetite for risk on technocratic whitewash of a broken machine, or will he use it to redesign the machine itself?
There is still time for Tinubu to be Nigeria’s greatest president. But greatness will not come from another round of federal road projects, another committee on national dialogue, another anthem, another round of subsidy removal, another temporary security operation, or another appeal for patience from citizens already stretched beyond endurance. It will come from one historic act of courage: restructuring Nigeria in one fell swoop into a true federation of constituent nations, with real fiscal autonomy, real security responsibility, real control over development priorities, and a centre finally reduced from imperial master to coordinating partner.
Tinubu now stands at one of those rare hinges of history where a leader’s entire legacy can turn, decisively and irrevocably, in one direction or the other. On one side lies the terrible possibility that his presidency becomes the name history attaches to Nigeria’s long-feared unravelling: high-sounding but hollow promises, painful reforms, widening despair, elite insulation and rampant insecurity finally tipping the republic into rupture. On the other side lies the possibility of statesmanship of a different order: the courage to admit that Nigeria’s crisis is not merely administrative, not merely economic, not merely security-related, but foundational. The question is whether Tinubu will be remembered as another president who tried to patch a collapsing roof while the foundation gave way or as the leader who finally summoned the courage to rebuild the house itself.
Restructuring would not erase the suffering Nigerians are currently enduring. It would not magically end hunger, insecurity, inflation or distrust overnight. But it would do something more fundamental: it would change the logic of the Nigerian state. It would move power closer to the peoples, communities and constituent nations that actually live with the consequences of governance. It would force responsibility downward and outward. It would allow regions to compete, innovate, secure themselves, develop according to their priorities, and bear the consequences of their choices. Above all, it would break the suffocating fiction that Abuja must remain the imperial centre from which all wisdom, money, security, permission and development must flow.
A restructured Nigeria would be a win-win for its constituent parts: it would free each region to pursue its own genius, and remove, at once, the centralised excuse under which regional mediocrity has too often taken shelter.
This is where Tinubu’s opportunity becomes almost providential. He is not merely another president confronted with the old Nigerian question. He is a president with unusual command over the political machinery of the state, including a National Assembly that, for better or worse, appears more disposed to his will than any president before him. Ordinarily, this should worry democrats. A legislature too eager to bend before the executive is a danger to republican government. But Nigeria is not in an ordinary moment. Tinubu now possesses the kind of legislative pathway that many reformist leaders could only dream of, even if its very ease should trouble anyone who cares about checks and balances.
There is another paradox. Tinubu is leading Nigeria at a time of heightened intra-regional distrust, when most constituent parts of the federation, including voices from the North, are now questioning the suffocating powers of the almighty centre. This is dangerous, but also clarifying. It means the old fiction has collapsed, and there is now an unprecedented convergence of consensus about the existential imperative of restructuring the Nigerian state. The question is no longer whether Nigeria needs restructuring, but whether the political class has the courage to admit what the country itself is already screaming. Tinubu emerged from a political tradition that once spoke loudly about true federalism, state police, resource control and the rights of constituent units. He now has the machinery, the moment and the historical pressure to act.
A pliant National Assembly and a federation restless with accumulated distrust are, in themselves, troubling signs of a damaged republic. But history sometimes gathers dangerous materials for redemptive purposes. In this case, the very conditions that expose Nigeria’s democratic weakness may also supply the force for its foundational repair. The circumstances are already assembled. Tinubu does not need to create the moment. He only needs to recognise it, seize it, and bend its dangerous energy towards restructuring before it bends the country towards rupture.
The irony, therefore, is that the very discontent now threatening to define Tinubu’s presidency may also become the fire through which it is redeemed. If President Tinubu continues on the present path of economic hardship without restructuring of the republic, he risks being remembered as the president who asked Nigerians to endure pain without showing them a new country at the end of it. But if he seizes this moment to restructure Nigeria, the narrative changes. The hardship of his era would still be debated and criticised. But his presidency would be defined by, and remembered for, one transformative stroke that altered the architecture of the republic forever. That is the difference between a pain-laden regime and a historic presidency.
