There is something both reassuring and dangerous about presidential speeches.
They reassure us because, for a few minutes, they can make a complicated country seem simple. They are dangerous because a well-written speech can sometimes create the impression that the work described in it has already been done.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 66th Independence Day address, titled “From Reforms to Prosperity,” is a carefully crafted speech. It has a clear narrative, a memorable metaphor, an identifiable destination and a reassuring conclusion. Its central argument is straightforward: Nigeria has endured the pain of reform; the worst is behind us; the foundations have been repaired; and the country can now move from reform to prosperity. That is a perfectly legitimate argument for a President to make.
An Independence Day speech, however, is not merely a literary exercise. It is also a moment of national accounting. This is where presidential speeches must be read differently from ordinary speeches.
A President cannot simply tell us what he hopes will happen. He is speaking from the most privileged vantage point available in the country: the vantage point from which the government possesses information, institutions, budgets, instruments of coercion and the power to act.
After such a speech, the question should not be just: Was it inspiring? The more useful question is: What exactly has changed, for whom, by how much, and what evidence supports this?
President Tinubu’s speech centres on the proposition that Nigeria inherited a deeply damaged economy in 2023 and that his administration chose treatment rather than temporary relief.
The most memorable illustration is the cancer metaphor. Nigeria, he says, was like a cancer patient forced to choose between painful treatment and the temporary comfort of morphine. Subsidy removal, exchange-rate reform and other measures are presented as the difficult treatment required to confront the underlying disease. It is an effective political metaphor. But metaphors, like medicines, must ultimately be tested by results. If the treatment is painful, the doctor must eventually show us the patient’s vital signs. That is where the speech becomes more interesting.
The President says the emergency treatment is over, the foundation has been repaired, and the central economic task has shifted from correcting the nation’s course to achieving “shared and widespread prosperity.” That marks a significant shift in the argument: it moves the administration from justification to accountability.
For the first part of the reform story, the government could reasonably spend considerable time explaining why difficult decisions were necessary. But once the government declares that the emergency treatment is over, citizens are entitled to ask for evidence of recovery.
This is where my earlier observations on presidential speeches remain relevant.
I have previously argued that a presidential speech can be excellent in the abstract and still become problematic when placed beside the reality of the people to whom it is addressed. In reviewing President Tinubu’s New Year address in 2024, I noted this tension: a speech may be beautifully constructed, but its real test begins when it is taken off the page and placed beside citizens’ circumstances. That distinction remains important.
The 2026 speech sets out many admirable aspirations. The President describes prosperity in Nigeria as a place where: farmers can cultivate safely; production costs fall; factories have reliable power; businesses can access credit; young people find productive work; food and transport become affordable; education becomes accessible; and families can look towards the future with confidence. That is a useful definition of prosperity because it moves beyond GDP and macroeconomic statistics. Indeed, this may be one of the strongest conceptual points in the speech: prosperity is not an economic statistic; it is an experience.
Once the President defines prosperity in those concrete terms, the speech invites us to measure the government against those realities. The farmer must be safer; the factory must have better power; the entrepreneur must obtain credit more easily; the young person must find productive work; and the family must be able to afford food and transport. That is the scoreboard.
One of the recurring problems in public policy discourse in Nigeria is our extraordinary capacity to confuse policy announcements with policy achievements. We announce, launch, commission, reform, inaugurate, and celebrate, and sometimes forget to ask what happened afterwards.
This is why I have consistently insisted that we judge the government not merely by what it says, but by what its policies produce. I framed governance around four Ps: Promise, Policy, Perception and Process.
The President’s Independence Day speech is very strong on Promise. It is reasonably clear on Policy. The harder questions concern Perception and Process.
How do citizens experience the reforms? And how effectively do government institutions translate policy into results? This distinction matters because the purpose of economic reform is not to win an argument with economists. It is to change economic behaviour and, ultimately, economic conditions.
A theme from my previous interventions that warrants repetition.
When Nigerians are suffering because goods are expensive, giving people more money without increasing the supply of goods and services can simply increase the amount of money chasing the same goods. I made this point in 2023 when commenting on the proposed wage award: sympathy for citizens is not an economic strategy if production does not rise alongside purchasing power.
The President’s present speech appears to understand this better. His emphasis on reducing production and transportation costs, improving agricultural productivity, expanding mechanised irrigation, increasing access to seeds and fertiliser, improving storage and transportation, and strengthening productive capacity is important.
This is the correct direction of the argument. Because ultimately, Nigeria cannot consume its way into prosperity. We have to produce our way into it; we have to transport our way into it; we have to finance our way into it; we have to educate our way into it; we have to manufacture our way into it; and we have to govern our way into it.
I also think the President should be careful with language of finality. The speech repeatedly uses language of arrival. “The emergency treatment is over.” “The foundation has been repaired.” “Nigeria has corrected its course.” “We have passed through our own Red Sea.” “The destination is in sight.” These are powerful phrases, but they create a burden of proof.
A government should be particularly careful when it announces that a difficult chapter has ended, because citizens will naturally look for evidence of the new chapter. The danger is not optimism. The danger is premature closure. Nigeria may have corrected its course. But a ship correcting its course is not the same as reaching its destination.
The difference between the two is navigation, discipline, fuel, weather, competent management and time. In economics, it is productivity.
There is another important silence we need to highlight. The President’s speech acknowledges that the reforms have caused profound hardship and that Nigerians have made sacrifices. That acknowledgement is welcome. But a national address should go beyond asking citizens to believe that their sacrifices will eventually be rewarded. It should explain how the reward will be distributed.
Shared prosperity is not merely prosperity that exists somewhere in the economy. It is prosperity distributed widely enough for the majority to experience it. This matters because reform has winners and losers.
A reform may improve a macroeconomic indicator while imposing severe costs on particular groups. A successful reform programme therefore requires not only economic correction but also mechanisms for managing its social consequences.
The question is not whether Nigerians should accept reform. The question is: What is the government doing for the Nigerian who cannot afford to wait for reform’s long-term benefits? Optimism alone cannot answer that question.
A philosophical point also deserves emphasis: Independence Day belongs to the country, not to the administration in office. Every government inherits it; every government speaks on it. No government owns it. The Nigerian state is older than the present administration and will outlive it.
That distinction is important because the Independence Day speech should ideally rise above the immediate political contest and remind us of the larger Nigerian project.
President Tinubu does attempt this. He speaks of the farmer, trader, teacher, entrepreneur and security personnel. He speaks of the promise of independence and the responsibility to deliver opportunity, dignity and a better life. That is the right territory. The strongest Independence Day speech is therefore not necessarily the one that makes the government look best. It is the one that prompts the country to think most clearly about itself.
The title of the speech is “From Reforms to Prosperity”. That gives the administration an unusually clear test. Reform is the means. Prosperity is the result. And results are measurable, not only in GDP but also in food prices, purchasing power, jobs, electricity, industrial output, agricultural yields, access to credit, transport costs, school attendance, healthcare, security, and the ability of an ordinary Nigerian to make a plan for next month and reasonably believe that the plan will survive next week.
This is why the President’s speech should not be dismissed simply because it is optimistic, nor accepted simply because it is eloquent. It should be tested. That is the citizen’s proper response to presidential rhetoric.
Perhaps the most important thing about a presidential Independence Day address is that it ends when the President stops speaking. The speech then leaves the television screen and enters the market, the farm, the factory, the classroom, the hospital, the bank, the road and the household. There, Nigerians will conduct their own review. They will not grade the metaphors. They will not grade the cadence. They will not care whether the speech was beautifully written.
Nigerians will ask simpler questions. Can I afford what I could before? Can I produce more? Can I sell more? Can I find work? Can I travel safely? Can I educate my children? Can I plan? Can I trust the system? These questions are neither partisan nor ideological. They are the questions of citizenship.
President Tinubu has declared that the age of reform has done its work and that the age of prosperity has begun. Very well. Then the country should move from listening to measuring. The President has promised prosperity. The next chapter must show the evidence. A presidential speech can announce a destination, but only citizens’ lived experience can confirm that the country has arrived. And that, ultimately, is the difference between a speech about prosperity and prosperity itself.
- business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.com
Anthony Kila is a Jean Monnet professor of Strategy and Development. He is currently Institute Director at the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies, CIAPS, Lagos, Nigeria. He is a regular commentator on the BBC and he works with various organisations on International Development projects across Europe, Africa and the USA. He tweets @anthonykila, and can be reached at anthonykila@ciaps.org
