The dollar’s managed decline and Nigeria’s moment of resolve, By Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú

History, I suspect, will be kinder to Bola Tinubu’s economic record than today’s headlines. And for Nigeria’s sake, I hope it comes sooner rather than later.

The reforms that have stabilised the naira are only as durable as the institutions that sustain them. The CBN’s independence must be protected. The FX unification must not be reversed under political pressure. The non-oil diversification that is just beginning to show results must be nurtured. Nigeria’s finance chief has projected a 4.68 per cent growth in 2026, with inflation averaging 16.5 per cent and the naira stabilising around ₦1,400 to the dollar. These are achievable targets but only if the administration sustains the resolve that got us here.

While the world’s reserve currency shows cracks, President Tinubu’s unflinching reforms have positioned Nigeria to turn global turbulence into national opportunity.

There is a kind of courage that history does not always recognise in the moment. It is the courage not of the battlefield but of the balance sheet; the courage to impose pain today so that a nation may breathe freely tomorrow. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, whatever his critics may say, has demonstrated precisely that courage since the very first hours of his administration. And the world, whether it intended to or not, has begun to reward him for it.

A Giant Wobbles

The United States dollar, the supreme arbiter of global commerce, the currency in which 89 per cent of all foreign exchange transactions are still denominated, is in managed decline. The dollar index fell more than 10 per cent in the first half of 2025 – its worst performance for that period in over 50 years. Fiscal profligacy in Washington, political pressure on the Federal Reserve, and a tectonic shift in global capital allocation, have combined to create the most serious challenge to the dollar’s supremacy since the end of the Bretton Woods era. Let us be clear, the dollar will not collapse. The dollar holds 56 per cent of global reserves, and it is the only currency with the depth, liquidity, and institutional infrastructure to anchor the world economy. But its slow, grinding erosion of dominance is no longer a theoretical projection, it is a documented trend. And like every shift in the tectonic plates of global finance, it sends tremors through every economy it touches, none more acutely than Nigeria.

Nigeria at the Intersection

For decades, Nigeria’s relationship with the dollar has been less a partnership than an addiction. We earn our foreign exchange in dollars from oil sales. We service our debts in dollars. We price our imports in dollars. We even denominate our aspirations in dollars. When the dollar sneezes, the naira catches pneumonia, and ordinary Nigerians pay the price in bread, fuel, school fees, and medication. This structural dependency is not a problem that any single administration created. It was baked into Nigeria’s economic architecture over six decades of oil dependence and policy timidity. Previous administrations understood this, but lacked the political will to confront it. Tinubu did not lack that will.

This is the critical point: Nigeria could only position itself to benefit from these global dynamics because Tinubu’s reforms have made the naira’s price discovery real. Under the old regime of multiple exchange rate windows, a weaker dollar would simply have deepened the arbitrage opportunities for the well-connected, while ordinary citizens see the naira erode in the parallel market. Today, with a unified, transparent FX market, global capital flows can actually reach Nigeria’s real economy.

The Reforms: Focus, Foresight, and Determination

On inauguration day, 29 May, 2023, President Tinubu did something that shocked a country conditioned to expect nothing but empty rhetoric from its leaders: he meant what he said. “Subsidy is gone,” he declared. Within hours, fuel queues that had paralysed Nigeria for years began to dissolve, not because the pain had ended, but because the pretence had. The removal of fuel subsidy, which had consumed hundreds of billions of naira annually, enriching a cartel of middlemen while impoverishing the state, was the first act of a man who had clearly thought deeply about Nigeria’s structural malaise. It was followed almost immediately by the unification of Nigeria’s multiple and corrupted foreign exchange windows into a single, market-determined rate. The naira, stripped of its artificial props, fell sharply.

The immediate pain was real and searing, but so was the medicine’s logic. What these reforms did, taken together, was to align Nigeria’s economic reality with its economic truth. The gap between the official and parallel market exchange rates, once a gaping 60 per cent chasm that enabled round-tripping, capital flight, and institutional corruption, has narrowed to approximately 2 per cent. External reserves have climbed to $45.5 billion. Inflation, which peaked at 33 per cent, has retreated to 14.45 per cent. Food inflation has fallen to single digits for the first time in over a decade. Non-oil exports grew nearly 20 per cent year-on-year in the first half of 2025. These are not talking points. They are data points. And they represent the vindication of a leader who chose the long view over the short applause.

Why the Dollar’s Weakness Is Nigeria’s Window

Here is the paradox that most commentators miss; a weaker dollar, in the current configuration of Nigeria’s reformed economy, is a tailwind, not a headwind. When the dollar softens globally, commodity prices, including oil, still Nigeria’s dominant export, tend to rise, since they are priced in dollars. Nigeria’s external debt burden, measured in real terms, eases. And Nigeria’s extraordinary monetary policy rate of 27.5 per cent, among the highest in the world, becomes even more attractive to international portfolio investors fleeing a low-yield dollar environment. This is the critical point: Nigeria could only position itself to benefit from these global dynamics because Tinubu’s reforms have made the naira’s price discovery real. Under the old regime of multiple exchange rate windows, a weaker dollar would simply have deepened the arbitrage opportunities for the well-connected, while ordinary citizens see the naira erode in the parallel market. Today, with a unified, transparent FX market, global capital flows can actually reach Nigeria’s real economy. That is the foresight embedded in what many at the time called reckless devaluation. It was not recklessness. It was architecture.

The window of opportunity created by a weakening dollar and rising oil revenues will not remain open indefinitely. The world’s dominant currency is in a slow decline. Nigeria’s economy, for the first time in years, is positioned not merely to survive that shift but to benefit from it. That positioning did not happen by accident. It happened because one man, in a moment of political peril, chose foresight over popularity, and determination over delay.

The Honest Accounting

Giving credit where it is due does not require us to be blind to the cost. Petrol prices have quadrupled. Food prices are more than 80 per cent higher than during the 2023 election. Poverty has risen, not fallen, in the immediate term. Debt servicing costs have doubled to over ₦16 trillion in the 2025 budget, crowding out allocations to education, health, and infrastructure. These are not statistics to be waved away; they represent real suffering by real Nigerians. But economic surgery of this magnitude has never, anywhere in the world, been painless. What distinguishes a statesman from a populist is not the avoidance of pain, it is the willingness to administer necessary treatment while keeping the patient alive and the long-term outcome in sight. On that measure, Tinubu deserves a fair hearing from history, even if the streets are still loud with grievance.

What Must Come Next

The global dollar story is, in its deeper structure, a story about what happens when nations lose their institutional credibility when central banks are bullied, when fiscal discipline is abandoned, and when the rule of law is treated as optional. Nigeria has its own version of this warning to heed. The reforms that have stabilised the naira are only as durable as the institutions that sustain them. The CBN’s independence must be protected. The FX unification must not be reversed under political pressure. The non-oil diversification that is just beginning to show results must be nurtured. Nigeria’s finance chief has projected a 4.68 per cent growth in 2026, with inflation averaging 16.5 per cent and the naira stabilising around ₦1,400 to the dollar. These are achievable targets but only if the administration sustains the resolve that got us here.

The window of opportunity created by a weakening dollar and rising oil revenues will not remain open indefinitely. The world’s dominant currency is in a slow decline. Nigeria’s economy, for the first time in years, is positioned not merely to survive that shift but to benefit from it. That positioning did not happen by accident. It happened because one man, in a moment of political peril, chose foresight over popularity, and determination over delay. History, I suspect, will be kinder to Bola Tinubu’s economic record than today’s headlines. And for Nigeria’s sake, I hope it comes sooner rather than later.

Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú, a former Commissioner for Information in Ondo State, is director of New Media and Corporate Communications of the All Progressives Congress (APC).