President Tinubu’s Bold But Subtle Reforms

As governor of Lagos State between 1999 and 2007, now President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was the foremost advocate and activist for the most fundamental and far-reaching reforms in Nigeria’s federal system.

At various times, then governor Tinubu pushed his Attorney -General and Commissioner of Justice, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, (SAN) to press at the apex court in the Federation, the Supreme Court, the various rights of Lagos State that were perceived to be breached by the Federal Government.

In that process, Lagos won several land- mark cases which upheld its right to have statutory allocations under the constitution released to the state; its constitutional responsibility over urban planning and environmental control; its rights over lottery and games betting; its right to create new local government councils without prejudice to the concomitant responsibility of the National Assembly to effect the necessary constitutional amendments for such new councils to become viable legal entities.

Of course, it is also well known that as governor of Lagos State, President Tinubu was the first to articulate the case for state police when he insisted that state created, regulated and run police outfits had become an inevitable imperative to an over-centralised, unitary police force so obviously incapable of effectively fulfilling its security obligations to a complex, diverse and plural Nigerian Federation.

Against this background of his history of political and Judicial activism in the pursuit of the restructuring of the Nigerian polity and the deepening of our federal practice, it was expected in some quarters that President Tinubu, on assumption of office, would take radical, even revolutionary, steps to effect path-breaking changes in the structure and character of the Nigerian Federation.

Such expectations not only underestimate the onerous complexities involved in the process of engineering fundamental structural change in Nigeria, but also exaggerate the capability of one person, no matter how well meaning, to remake and refashion the country according to his own imagination. Nigeria is a complex amalgam of an assortment of peoples, cultures, perspectives, perceptions, assumptions, beliefs and psychological outlooks as well as philosophical orientations.

The strength and potential of any transformative leader for a reasonable degree of success in Nigeria is his strategic dexterity to bring about necessary change mostly in an incremental manner and in a way that does not rupture ingrained habits and expectations with possible large scale dysfunctional consequences.

And that is the genius of President Bola Tinubu’s governance style in the little over two and a half years that he has been in power since May 2023. To his credit, Pres- ident Tinubu has taken bold, reformative steps where necessary especially with regard to the economy.

But generally, he has proceeded cautiously taking into consideration the myriad peculiarities and sensitivities of our diverse polity and recording concrete changes without destabilizing consequences. Let us take the issue of State police. The President of Nigeria will necessarily have to approach this issue more cautiously and tentatively than when considering the matter purely from the prism of a state governor.

For one, not all states have the munificent fiscal resources to establish and fund state police outfits. Again, there is the understandable fear among opposition elements in states as to what antagonistic and dictatorial uses some state governors may deploy police outfits under their control.

Furthermore, there is the issue of qualitative standardisation of training, psycho- logical disposition, ethical orientation and professionalism that state police outfits cannot be allowed to fall below.

All this implies that state police cannot be a matter of presidential diktat, brought into being ‘with immediate effect’. Rather, it will entail close collaborative hard work among the presidency, National Assembly, state governors and legislators as well as current members of the existing security architecture among critical stakeholders as is currently being done.

Yet, the continuing equipping, training and re-training of the military, police and intelligence services; the expansion and reorienting of the National Security and Civil Defense Corp (NSCDC); Establishment of the Forest Rangers; upgrading and modernisation of police training colleges etc are gradual reforms being undertaken in this critical sector by a President who knows he must tread cautiously, wisely but firmly to achieve defined objectives.

In a similar vein, the Ministry of Livestock Production, headed by some of the best and brightest brains from the requisite parts of the country known for this form of animal husbandry, are planning for and gradually bringing about the much needed modernisation of techniques, practices and orientations in an area of the economy with huge, yet untapped potentials.

Again, through the Electricity Act 2023, the administration has brought about a decentralisation that enables states to build and regulate their own electricity markets with several states now actively establishing their own power supply markets to foster local development. Minister of Power, Chief Adebayo Adelabu, has said that the determined implementation of the Electricity Act, 2023, has enabled state governments to independently generate, transmit, and distribute power.

Consequently, he notes that for the first time in history, state-level electrical markets now allow regions to design local energy solutions directed to meet their pe- culiar economic needs. Another important development is the development of a National Integrated Electricity Policy, which was approved in February 2025, and which defines the responsibilities of regulators, utilities, investors, technical operators and consumers transcending traditional and renewable power generation sectors.

This under Tinubu marked the end of over two decades without a broad -based roadmap for the power sector. Again, in the railway sector, the shifting of the responsibility for rail to the Concurrent Legislative List from the Exclusive Legislative List has been a major devel- opment under the Tinubu administration.

This has opened up the space for states and private investors to develop rail projects and open new financing avenues. Some of the key standard Gauge lines focused on here include Kano-Katsina-Maradi aimed for completion this year to boost trade; a major overhaul of the 2,024 km narrow -gauge line for economic revival in the Eastern Corridor and the Kaduna-Kano and Lagos-Kano Lines as key components of the sector’s modernisation drive.

Perhaps the most poignant illustration of the difficulties and challenges of implementing reforms in a complex entity like Nigeria is the mixed reception accorded President Tinubu’s tax reforms, which took effect at the beginning of this year. But for the tenacity of the President in insisting on the imperative of the tax reforms, the most intensive and extensive re-enginnering of Nigeria’s fiscal governance architecture since independence, the complex of laws comprising the task reforms would have been still born.

The opposition and animosity to the laws fueled by a mosaic of factors including imaginary regional antagonism, contrived tales of super exploitation of the less privileged, undemonstrated and unscientific assertions of tax imposition without developmental benefits to show, have been deep and intense.

At the commencement of the controversy when the proposed new tax reforms were first unveiled to the public, a leading statesman from a part of the country declared vehemently that the law was dead on arrival; that it was designed against a particular region even though he had not read the draft and had no intention of doing so!! Of course, architects of the Tinubu ad- ministration’s comprehensive tax law reforms, have gone to great extents and left no stone turned to correct misconceptions and explain the essence of the reforms to Nigerians.

Made up essentially of four components, the new laws encapsulate the Nigerian Tax Act (NTA); the Nigerian Tax Administration Act (NTAA); The Nigerian Revenue Service (Establishment) Act (NRSA) and the Joint Revenue Board (Establishment) Act.

As summarized in one report, “Together, these reforms consolidate and repeal more than a dozen outdated tax statutes, setting a unified direction for personal income tax, corporate taxation, VAT, capital gains, and fiscal governance”.

 

 

• Honourable Abiodun Faleke is the Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Finance