The last time a Nigerian president was in Britain for a state visit was 1989, when Nigeria was an oil-dependent military dictatorship of 95mn people in the throes of a painful IMF-endorsed structural adjustment programme.
Thirty-seven years on, Bola Tinubu’s planned visit on Wednesday at the invitation of King Charles III sees him presiding over an oil-dependent democracy of 242mn people in the midst of painful structural reform of Nigeria’s own making.
For most ordinary Nigerians — tens of millions of whom live in poverty — economic conditions are at least as dire as nearly 40 years ago when General Ibrahim Babangida was in charge. And though democracy has been consolidated since the end of military rule in 1999, bringing certain freedoms and opportunities, life has been made more precarious in swaths of the country by waves of violence from jihadi militants, bandits and kidnapping gangs.
Yet, after nearly three years in office, Tinubu can claim some victories when it comes to macroeconomic stability. “When I sit in rooms of foreigners talking about investing in Nigeria, there’s a very positive mood because people have made money,” says Yewande Sadiku, a London-based Nigerian investment banker at Standard Bank.
Since Tinubu became president in May 2023, the exchange rate has stabilised, albeit after a stomach-churning devaluation he engineered, when the naira plunged from an artificial official rate of 460 to the dollar to around 1,600. It has since notched up to about 1,400 and the gap between the official and parallel rate has almost closed.
Net reserves are up nearly tenfold from the $3bn Tinubu inherited, less than a month of import cover, and the central bank has stopped printing money to finance deficit spending. Interest rates are finally coming down, though they are still at a business-crushing 26.5 per cent, even after a half-point cut in February.
Growth, which had gone backwards in real per capita terms for much of the previous decade, is projected to reach 4.4 per cent this year after notching up nearly 4 per cent in 2025. Unlike most economies, oil-producing Nigeria may actually benefit from higher oil prices resulting from the war in Iran.
“We do see quite a lot of progress,” says Abebe Aemro Selassie, director of the IMF’s Africa department. “This government has been really good at reducing the macroeconomic imbalances and distortions the country faced for many years. They have done a really creditable job on that.”
Yet much of this is in the realm of fantasy for millions of Nigerians struggling to put food on the table and to send their children to school. The World Bank estimates that the number of people living in poverty rose from 40 per cent of Nigeria’s population, or about 81mn people, in 2019 to 61 per cent, or 139mn people, last year.
Many people complain of skipping meals and of the catastrophic economic consequences of falling ill. Even well-off Nigerians have seen the dollar value of their pensions fall by two-thirds through devaluation.
“Everybody has been pauperised,” says Sadiku of Standard Bank. “There’s a lag between when reforms show up in economic indices and when they translate into people’s lives.”
Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, chair of Access Bank Group, says people must understand that, after a decade of economic self-harm under the late Muhammadu Buhari, president from 2015 to 2023, Tinubu took over an economy in dire straits. “We couldn’t pay our bills. The macroeconomic variables were going haywire,” he says. “Tinubu stabilised an economy on the brink of failure.”
Now, he says, businesses such as telecoms company MTN, Dangote Cement and Nestlé are making record naira profits, suggesting that those who headed for the door after Tinubu took over — Diageo sold its controlling stake in Guinness to Singapore’s Tolaram and Procter & Gamble halted manufacturing of detergent and nappies — may have mistimed their exits.
On taking over, Aig-Imoukhuede says, Tinubu faced three emergencies — an unsustainable exchange rate, an unsustainable oil subsidy and a major security crisis. The first two were tackled head on. Tinubu famously cancelled the fuel subsidy with three mumbled words in his inauguration speech.
But, if anything, the security situation has deteriorated. In 2025, according to Acled, which tracks global violence, there were 12,000 conflict-related deaths. SBM Intelligence reported that at least 4,722 people were kidnapped in the year to July 2025 in what Nigerians joke is one of the country’s few flourishing industries.
The failure of the government to get on top of its interlocking security crises reached a turning point last November when Donald Trump threatened to go in “guns-a-blazing” to end what he claimed was the persecution of Christians. Trump bombed what he said was a jihadist stronghold in Sokoto state on Christmas Day.
Though the Nigerian government vigorously contested Trump’s characterisation of the problem, pointing out that Muslims were just as likely to be victims of violence, it has sought to repair relations with the Trump administration. Tinubu has since undertaken a security shake-up, appointing a former general as defence minister, replacing his police chief and initiating police reform.
But Dele Olojede, a Nigerian Pulitzer journalism prizewinner and founder of the Africa in the World ideas festival, is sceptical about the government’s ability to get a grip. “We don’t have people who are serious about governing; we have people who are serious about politics,” he says, adding that Nigerian politicians have consistently failed to provide even the basics of government.
“If you cannot keep people safe, you cannot have economic activity,” he adds. “If you haven’t planted rice, yam tubers, cashews because of constant threat of violence and actual violence, then you cannot seriously be talking about a promising macro picture.”
Tinubu will see his record tested at the polls next year, though no one doubts his political acumen or ability to win a second term. He won the presidency last time with an unconvincing mandate of 37 per cent on a turnout of only 27 per cent, but he has since masterfully consolidated his power. After several recent defections, 31 of the 36 state governors are with Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress party (APC).
“His is a minority government but he’s ruling as though he won a landslide,” says Olu Fasan, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
For Fasan, the problem of translating politics into development for ordinary Nigerians goes beyond today’s administration. There has never been, he says, a social contract between the government and governed and almost no expectation that the state can improve things.
“So much store has been placed on a trickle-down economy,” he says, adding that the assumption is that, if a few naira billionaires are doing well, then the rest of the country can do well too. “But that has not happened in decades
