Nigeria marks its 66th Independence Day today. The flag is ours. The right to govern ourselves has been ours since the 1st of October 1960. That achievement still matters, and it should be honoured. But political freedom was only the first half of sovereignty. For most of the years that followed, the treasury still belonged to someone else. For six decades a sovereign state imported its petrol, leaned on a single export, set its currency by decree and printed money to cover its deficits. That is not independence. It is dependent on a flag. And the dependence was never an accident. It was a political settlement, with beneficiaries and defenders in every party that has ever held power. This is why the Renewed Hope agenda should be understood for what it is: not a set of technical adjustments, but a rupture in that settlement, the first sustained attempt in a generation to dismantle dependence rather than manage it for another electoral cycle.
Political economists have a name for what that settlement produced: a rentier state. It means a government that lives on oil money. And because it does not have to earn its revenue from citizens, it does not have to answer to them. The petrol subsidy was the clearest proof. By 2022 the explicit fuel subsidy and the implicit subsidy in multiple exchange rates were together costing the country about N10 trillion a year. A subsidy on a product the poor consume least, administered through importers and licence-holders, is not welfare. The 59% gap between the official and street rates at the end of 2022 was the same settlement in another currency: a licence to print money for whoever sat near the allocation desk. When the rents ran short, the state borrowed from its own central bank until debt service was consuming 96% of federal revenue. A government that spends nearly everything it earns on interest is not sovereign. It is a debtor administering a territory for its creditors and cronies.
That is the inheritance these reforms were designed to end. True sovereignty extends far beyond the historic liberation of 1960; it is tested by the structural health of the economy and by whether public wealth still leaks into private speculation. The old settlement survived because its beneficiaries could dress rent-seeking up as public compassion. Every reform therefore has a losing coalition with a microphone; that is not a sign the reforms are wrong, but a sign they have finally touched the source of the dependence. Renewed Hope is changing the political meaning of this Independence Day: from a commemoration of 1960 to a claim on the right to feed, fuel, fund and price ourselves. To make that claim real, the settlement had to be broken where it actually lived: in the budget, in the currency, in the fuel queue, and in a state that imported food while locking talent behind school fees. These reforms represent four fundamental breaks from the old settlement.
The first break was fiscal, and it was a break with the rentier class. Ending the subsidy on 29 May 2023 moved N15.8 trillion over thirty months from importers to the Federation Account, where the constitution says it belongs. Monthly allocations to the three tiers of government tripled, from N786 billion in May 2023 to N2.338 trillion for August 2026, and debt service fell from 96 per cent of revenue towards half. And for the first time the dividend was routed to citizens rather than patrons: a N70,000 minimum wage, double what it was in May 2023; cash transfers to 15 million households; and the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, interest-free and matched to biometric data so no politician can hand it to a nephew, which had reached more than 1.1 million students across 270 institutions by March 2026. The next phase of Nigeria’s independence conversation should not be whether a subsidy returns, but whether a country that won political freedom in 1960 can now win economic freedom from a policy that mortgaged the treasury, rewarded smuggling, and called dependence relief. Real independence is not cheaper petrol borrowed from tomorrow; it is a state that can pay its bills, protect the poor with targeted compensation, and convert the pain of reform into a life citizens can afford without the government pretending to be a filling station.
The second break was monetary, and it was a break with the arbitrage economy. A currency with two prices is a machine for transferring wealth from producers to insiders.
Unification in June 2023 replaced that fiction with a single market price. The adjustment was sharp, but the naira now tells the truth.
The spread between official and parallel markets, 59 per cent at the end of 2022, had narrowed to about 4 per cent by September 2026. Reserves, which had slid to $33 billion by late 2023, stood at $54.86 billion in September 2026, the highest in 18 years. Capital importation rose from $1.13 billion in the quarter before Renewed Hope to $10.37 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Inflation, 22.41 per cent in May 2023 and climbing, was 15.39 per cent in August 2026 and falling. Capital does not flee poor countries; it flees countries that lie about their prices. Political independence was declared in 1960. Monetary independence begins when the national currency has one price.
The third break was energy, and it was a break with the most lucrative racket in Nigerian public life. For four decades Africa’s largest oil producer imported almost every litre it burned, and a political economy of licences and ‘under-recovery’ grew fat on the queue at Apapa. Nobody in that chain wanted a working refinery, which is why the state-owned ones never did. In August 2026 the Dangote refinery supplied 71 per cent of Nigeria’s petrol and imports fell 26 per cent in a single month. The CNG initiative has put more than 93,000 vehicles on a home-produced fuel at roughly half the price of petrol. And the 614-kilometre Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano pipeline, now over 94 per cent complete, will carry southern gas to northern factories, fertiliser plants and power stations: geographic justice in steel, ending a settlement in which southern gas was flared while the North sat in energy poverty. The point is not only cheaper fuel. It is to retain wealth inside the local economy.
The last break is the productive one: a state that consumed talent, imported food and depended on others to move what it produced. Human capital, food security and productive infrastructure are the bedrock of economic sovereignty. The student loan and Three Million Technical Talent programme are expanding access to education and skills, while the Agro-Pocket scheme has put subsidised inputs in the hands of 2.8 million smallholders and supported more than 2.5 million tonnes of staple production. Growth reached 4.43% in Q2 2026, from 2.51% when the reforms began, with agriculture and industry contributing to the expansion. But production means little if goods cannot reach markets. The 700-kilometre Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, the 1,000-kilometre Badagry-Sokoto corridor and investments in deep-sea ports are intended to connect farms, factories and markets, while textile clusters seek to rebuild domestic manufacturing. If these systems hold, Nigeria increasingly feeds itself, moves what it produces and exports skills and goods rather than dependence. If they fail, the old settlement returns wearing a new slogan.
Today, at 66, independence is no longer only a date. It is a reckoning with decades of artificial distortions, and a test of whether leadership can be both firm and answerable to households still carrying the cost. Renewed Hope, on this Independence Day, is neither a passive expectation nor an empty slogan. It is a pact: that the rupture will not stop at prices and pipelines, but will end in a country that can feed, fuel, fund and price itself.
Tinubu Support Group joins all Nigerians that are not just celebrating Independence but are celebrating a shift. For more than sixty years, Nigeria perfected what Kwame Nkrumah warned Africa about: that ‘political independence is but a facade if economic freedom is not possible.’We are celebrating a renewed hope rooted in economic prosperity for every Nigerian.
Happy 66th Independence Day, Nigeria.