Repositioning Ad Nauseam: When Will Nigeria’s Economy Ever Stand Up? -By Isaac Asabor

There is a peculiar pattern in Nigeria’s democratic journey that would be comical if it were not so tragic. Every time a new administration takes the reins in Abuja, it brings along a freshly minted excuse for non-performance. In 1999, when we finally emerged from the jackboot of military rule, politicians hid behind the phrase “nascent democracy” as though democracy itself were a sickly infant that could not be expected to walk, let alone deliver good governance. For years, any failure, any malfunction, any audacious looting was waved away with a weary sigh: “Our Democracy is still nascent.”

Then came President Muhammadu Buhari. After he defeated Goodluck Jonathan in 2015, the excuse machine simply changed its tune. For the better part of his first term and well into his second, every fault, from a tanking economy to decaying infrastructure, was laid at the feet of Jonathan. It was the predecessor’s fault, we were told. The inherited decay was monumental. But as the years rolled by and the clock ticked towards 2023, Buhari’s chorus shifted. No longer could he blame Jonathan; that script had grown too old. So, he and his ministers unveiled a new magic word: “repositioning.”

In the twilight of his tenure, Buhari declared that he had successfully “repositioned” the Nigerian economy away from its crippling oil dependence. He pointed to a few railways, some anchor borrowers, and border closures. Never mind that by the time he left, Nigeria’s GDP had cratered from roughly $493 billion in 2015 to about $363.8 billion. Never mind that total public debt soared to nearly 77 trillion naira, and that poverty rates had metastasized. The economy had been “repositioned”, whatever that meant.

Now, we have President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And here is the central grievance of this article: Tinubu has not only inherited the same tired lexicon, but he seems determined to stretch it into a full first term, if not longer. He does not speak of reviving the economy. He does not speak of a Marshall Plan for Nigerian enterprise. Instead, each time he addresses the nation, each time the naira wobbles or food prices soar, we hear the same hollow refrain: “We are repositioning the economy.” One is forced to ask a simple, devastating question: repositioning for what? And for how long?

If Buhari spent eight full years claiming to reposition the economy, why does Tinubu need to start the process all over again? Was Buhari’s repositioning a mirage? Or is Tinubu admitting, by his own repetition, that his predecessor left nothing but rubble? The Nigerian

people are not fools. They see the game: “repositioning” has become the latest in a long line of political escape hatches, a phrase so vague that it can never be proven false, yet so grand that it demands infinite patience.

Let us be clear about the absurdity of the timeline. President Tinubu is now well into his first term. And by his own frequent admission, he is still “repositioning.” That means almost the entire first term will have been consumed by positioning, not action. What exactly is being repositioned? The chairs on the Titanic? When a man spends four years moving furniture around a burning house, do we applaud his interior design skills, or do we demand a fire brigade?

The uncomfortable truth is that “repositioning” is an alibi. A leader who intends to revive an economy sets benchmarks: inflation down by X percent within 18 months; unemployment halved by year three; the naira stabilized to a specific band. A leader who intends to “reposition” offers nothing measurable. It is an invitation to an open-ended wait. And Nigerians have been waiting since May 29, 2023.

Consider the data that Tinubu inherited, data that Buhari’s “repositioning” produced. According to World Bank and IMF figures widely reported at the end of Buhari’s tenure, the economy had shrunk in dollar terms, foreign investment had fled, and the debt service-to-revenue ratio had become grotesque. The agricultural policies that Buhari boasted about,  the border closures, the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, did not stop Nigeria from becoming a world capital of food inflation. The infrastructure that was supposedly “repositioning” trade had not stopped the closure of thousands of small businesses.

And yet, here is Tinubu, standing on that same wobbly foundation, telling us he needs to reposition what was already supposed to have been repositioned. It would be like a surgeon saying, “I’m not going to operate; I’m just going to reposition the scalpel for four years.” Meanwhile, the patient bleeds out. In his May 29 Speech recently, he in part stated, “Our economy is now more competitive and better positioned for sustainable growth than it was in 2023.

The semantic trick is worth dissecting. Why “reposition” instead of “revive”? Because revival implies urgency. Revival suggests that something was once alive, died, and needs immediate resuscitation. That would create an expectation of speed, of results within months, not years. Repositioning, on the other hand, suggests a leisurely, almost aesthetic exercise. You reposition a sofa. You reposition a painting. You do not reposition a collapsing currency. By choosing this word, Tinubu has deliberately lowered the bar so that even the most modest of achievements can be presented as “progress in the repositioning agenda.”

But Nigerians are hungry, literally and figuratively. They do not need the economy to be “repositioned.” They need it to work. They need factories to hum, farmers to earn, and the naira to buy more than yesterday. They need electricity that does not vanish every few hours. These are not “repositioning” tasks; these are revival tasks. And revival cannot wait for a full presidential term of excuses.

Let us also address the political cowardice embedded in this pattern. Under the “nascent democracy” era, politicians refused to be held accountable because the system was “new.” Under Buhari, they refused accountability because Jonathan had “ruined everything.” Now, under Tinubu, we are being asked to surrender four whole years to a vague “repositioning” exercise. What comes after that? If he wins a second term, will we hear that the repositioning is still ongoing? Will we be told, “We have repositioned the repositioning”?

The time has come for the Nigerian press and the Nigerian people to refuse this linguistic game. Every time President Tinubu says, “We are repositioning the economy,” the response should be a loud, unified question: “To where? And when will you be done?” The economy is not a piece of office furniture. It is the living fabric of 200 million people’s livelihoods. It cannot spend years being repositioned while families decide which meals to skip.

If Buhari’s eight years of repositioning left us with a smaller GDP, higher debt, and more poverty, then the entire concept has failed. To watch Tinubu double down on the same discredited language is to watch a sequel to a bad movie, hoping for a different ending. But the script is identical: blame the past, invoke a process, deliver nothing measurable, and demand patience.

No more. The democracy is no longer nascent; it is a quarter of a century old. The previous administration has been gone for long enough. And the economy does not need repositioning – it needs a resurrection. The question that hangs over Aso Rock like a thundercloud is simple, urgent, and deserves an answer before the end of this year: “Mr. President, when will you stop repositioning and start reviving?”

If the answer requires the entirety of your first term, then you have already told Nigerians that your tenure will produce nothing but excuses. And we have had enough excuses to last another twenty-five years.