Deck: Bola Tinubu diagnosed financialism’s war on the poor with surgical precision. Three years into his presidency, the patient is still bleeding — and the surgeon has changed sides.
There is something uniquely unsettling about reading Financialism: Water from an Empty Well today, not as a policy text, but as a mirror held up to power. In that book, wrote with unusual clarity about the structural violence embedded in modern economic governance. Financialism, he argued, was not neutral. It was a system that privileged capital over labour, liquidity over livelihoods, and stability over justice. It drained the real economy to sustain the abstract one.
What made the argument compelling was not merely its critique, but its confidence in alternatives. Tinubu called for an active state — one willing to shape markets, protect domestic industry, stabilise agricultural incomes, and resist the rigid policy templates of international financial institutions. It was a vision rooted in production, not speculation; in people, not balance sheets.
Three years into his presidency, that vision appears distant.
The most defining early decision of the administration — the removal of fuel subsidies — was executed with speed and conviction. Economically, it could be defended. Politically, it was bold. Socially, it was seismic. Without a fully operational safety net, the shock transmitted immediately into everyday life: transport costs surged, food prices climbed, and household budgets collapsed under the weight of inflation. Reform, in its purest form, arrived without insulation.
The naira followed a similar trajectory. Exchange rate liberalisation was long overdue, but its implementation in a structurally import-dependent economy produced predictable consequences. The currency weakened sharply, and with it, the purchasing power of millions. The logic of the market prevailed; the lived reality of citizens deteriorated.
At the fiscal level, the contradictions are even harder to ignore. Nigeria now operates one of the largest budgets in its history, yet debt servicing consumes a disproportionate share of government revenue. Education and health — the foundations of long-term development — remain constrained. Security spending, though still significant, struggles to keep pace with an expanding threat landscape. The numbers are large; their impact feels small.
To be fair, the administration does not lack defenders. There is a coherent argument that what Nigeria is undergoing is a necessary stabilisation phase. External reserves have improved. Investor confidence shows signs of recovery. Institutions such as have responded positively to aspects of the reform agenda. These are not trivial gains. They matter.
But they are not sufficient.
Stabilisation is a macroeconomic condition. Governance is a human one. A country can balance its books and still imbalance its society. The metrics of success at the level of capital flows and credit ratings do not automatically translate into dignity at the level of daily life. And this is precisely where the tension lies — not between reform and resistance, but between orthodoxy and the ideas the President himself once advanced.
Because nothing in the current policy mix is conceptually alien to orthodox economics. A technocrat trained in Washington or London could have designed much of it. That, ultimately, is the point. Financialism was not a manual for better technocracy. It was an argument against technocracy as a governing philosophy when detached from social outcomes.
The tragedy, if it is one, is not that reform is happening. It is that it is happening in a way the book explicitly warned against.
Yet the story is not closed. Power, unlike theory, has the advantage of reversibility. Policies can be recalibrated. Priorities can be reordered. The intellectual resources for doing so already exist — not in external prescriptions, but in the President’s own earlier thinking.
A government committed to that framework would not abandon reform, but it would sequence and cushion it differently. It would build a genuine social protection floor — not as an afterthought, but as a precondition. It would account transparently for every naira saved from subsidy removal, converting public sacrifice into visible public goods. It would move decisively to support domestic production, not through rhetoric but through credit policy, procurement, and targeted protection. It would ensure that finance serves industry, not the reverse. It would invest seriously in technical education, aligning skills with industrial ambition. And it would confront the debt question not only as a fiscal issue, but as a social one — restructuring obligations where necessary to protect essential spending.
None of these ideas are radical. They are, in fact, familiar — because they have already been written.
Which brings us to the deeper question. What is the relationship between ideas and power? Are books like Financialism intellectual commitments, or are they political artefacts — persuasive in opposition, disposable in office?
If the former, then the current moment demands a return, not to nostalgia, but to alignment. If the latter, then the implications are more troubling. It would suggest that the poor are not the subjects of policy, but its constant variables — invoked in argument, burdened in implementation.
The real issue, then, is not whether the President can stabilise the economy. It is whether he can do so without abandoning the intellectual position that brought him to power.
Because in the end, the question is simple, even if the answer is not:
Can a leader govern by his own ideas — or must those ideas always yield to the gravity of office?
This is Apt.
I still believe that the President can balance between the two.
He probably realized late that governance at the top is different from the State Level which he previously occupied.
Nigeria is a multidimensional country with different cultures, tribes, way of life, ideas and people. All these ought to be taken into consideration when coming out with policies and ideas that will affect the economy