Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
A SERMON FOR THE SIXTY SIXTH YEAR
On the morning of 1 October 2026, President Bola Tinubu addressed the nation and did not speak as a President. He preached.
Under the theme From Reforms to Prosperity, he told Nigerians that the country has passed through its own Red Sea. The Promised Land, he said, is in sight. And then the instruction that closed the sermon: no looking back.
It is a bold text to choose. The speech casts its author as the deliverer who parted the waters, and casts every critic as the faithless murmurer in the camp.
A man who borrows the Exodus must be ready to be read against it.
Nigerians who have walked these three years on foot deserve a second reading of the same scripture. They also deserve a second reading of the same figures. On both, the sermon fails.
THE GOD OF THE EXODUS BEGAN BY HEARING THE CRY
Before there was a Red Sea, there was a burning bush. And the first words spoken from that bush were not about reform, revenue or foreign reserves.
“I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows.” Exodus 3:7
The deliverance began with an admission. Heaven did not open by telling the slaves that their pain was the accumulated consequence of earlier dynasties.
The Tinubu speech does the opposite. It mentions the family that cannot find the next meal, the next school fee, the next medical bill. Then, in the very next breath, it declares that their struggle did not begin with the reforms of the last three years.
The suffering is acknowledged only so that it can be disowned.
This is the same government that, when the Catholic Bishops came to the Villa in July and spoke of a bleeding nation, answered that the nation is not bleeding. A deliverer who cannot hear the cry has no business quoting the God who did.
THERE WAS MANNA IN THE WILDERNESS
Read Exodus 16. The Israelites murmured and longed for the fleshpots of Egypt. They looked back for one reason only: they were hungry.
Heaven did not answer with a lecture on fiscal discipline. Heaven answered with bread, every morning, while the march continued. Nobody was told to starve until Canaan.
Now look at Tinubu’s wilderness. The National Bureau of Statistics put food inflation at 19.57 per cent in August 2026. Headline inflation stood at 15.39 per cent, and it climbed through the first half of this year before easing.
Understand what those numbers mean. Falling inflation does not mean falling prices. It means prices are still rising, only a little less quickly than before.
Lagos, the President’s own state and his political fortress, recorded the highest headline inflation in the federation in August, at 23.68 per cent.
In the wilderness of Moses, bread fell every morning. In the wilderness of Tinubu, the price of bread rises every month.
The speech offers CREDICORP as relief, consumer credit for cars, solar panels and phones. But the Central Bank holds its benchmark rate at 26.5 per cent. A loan priced off that benchmark is not manna. It is a debt wearing a smile.
THE DOCTOR WHO ONCE OPPOSED HIS OWN CURE
The centrepiece of the speech is a parable. Nigeria is a cancer patient. He may choose painful treatment and live, or he may ask for morphine and die.
Only two doors. That is the trick. Every competent physician knows the third: measure the dose, prepare the patient, watch the vital signs, and adjust.
Nigeria has seen that third door. Between 1999 and 2007, the Obasanjo and Atiku administration moved the pump price of petrol in about 7 measured steps, from 20 naira to 75 naira, through the PPPRA framework. Each step was absorbed before the next was taken. That is deregulation managed by people who respected the patient.
And Bola Tinubu knew the third door well. On 11 January 2012, as an opposition leader, he wrote against the sudden removal of subsidy and branded the price jump a “Jonathan tax”. When the people protested that January, the Jonathan government listened and brought the price back to 97 naira within days.
On 29 May 2023, the same Bola Tinubu stood at his inauguration and announced that subsidy is gone. No framework. No preparation. No vital signs. The man who had condemned the abrupt dose administered it himself, in one go, and refused to step back.
He was not proposing a treatment. He was pronouncing a sentence.
The parable has a second defect. Once all pain is defined as a side effect of the cure, no amount of suffering can ever prove the cure is wrong. Hunger becomes evidence of healing. A treatment that can never be shown to fail is not medicine. It is superstition with a budget.
THE ADDICTION THEY NEVER CURED
The speech warns against certain influential but regressive voices who would return Nigeria to the abuse of addictive subsidies. Everyone in the hall knew whose voice was meant.
So let the record speak first about the preacher. In February 2024, the IMF confirmed that subsidy had quietly returned through price caps. The government’s own ASAP report admitted 3.6 trillion naira spent on subsidy in 2023, with 5.4 trillion naira projected for 2024. The addiction was renounced on the podium and fed in the back office.
Then ask where the savings went. The Finance Minister, Taiwo Oyedele, has put the subsidy savings released between June 2023 and December 2025 at 15.8 trillion naira. On 30 July 2026, he told Reuters that those savings were absorbed by debt servicing.
The people bore the pain. The creditors collected the gain.
Atiku Abubakar has said categorically that he will return the subsidy. But the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan sets out exactly how: targeted, capped, transparently budgeted and independently audited. It moves the support from importation to production, from middlemen to Nigerian refineries, and from unverifiable claims to verifiable barrels. It is a committed plan, published in advance, placed before the people to examine.
One man took the subsidy from the people and handed the savings to the creditors. The other will take it from the middlemen and hand it back to the people.
That is not regression. That is direction.
TWENTY BILLION DOLLARS THAT ARRIVED AS 135 MILLION
The speech declares that foreign direct investment continues to rise each year. Earlier this year, the President went further and said Nigeria was attracting close to 20 billion dollars in foreign direct investment in 2026 alone.
His own statistics office tells a different story. Foreign direct investment for the whole of 2025 was 923 million dollars, under 4 per cent of all capital imported. In the first quarter of 2026 it fell to 135.08 million dollars, down from 357.80 million dollars in the quarter before. That was 1.30 per cent of the inflow.
20 billion dollars promised. 135 million dollars delivered in the quarter.
What came instead was portfolio money, about 95 per cent of first quarter inflows, with the banking sector alone taking 7.55 billion dollars. That is money chasing high interest rates, not money building factories.
Hot money is not investment. It is a visitor who keeps his bags packed by the door.
The speech invokes unnamed international observers who, it says, have each concluded that the reforms worked. Named observers are less obliging. In April, the IMF cut its 2026 growth forecast for Nigeria from 4.4 per cent to 4.1 per cent, citing mounting global and domestic pressures.
Then there is the boast of over 4 per cent growth this year. The first quarter of 2026 came in at 3.89 per cent. And look beneath the headline of the second quarter: industry growth fell to 3.96 per cent from 7.46 per cent a year earlier, while manufacturing’s share of the economy dropped from 9.57 per cent to 7.72 per cent in a single quarter.
The President says he wants to see more Nigerians making things. His own figures show fewer things being made. And the 7 per cent growth he once set as his target is nowhere in sight.
THE GENERATION THAT DIED IN THE DESERT
The President should have read further. In the Exodus, the Red Sea is not the end of the journey. It is the beginning of forty years in the wilderness.
The generation that crossed the sea did not enter the land. By the account of Numbers 14, they died in the desert, all but Joshua and Caleb. Even Moses was only allowed to see Canaan from the top of Pisgah. He died on Mount Nebo with the promise still across the river.
So by the speech’s own scripture, the Nigerians who paid for these reforms with their savings, their meals and their children’s fees are not the ones who will be fed. The land is promised to somebody else’s children, at some other time.
Listen to the timetable. In 2023 the promise was Renewed Hope. In 2026 the promise is that prosperity is next. And in the same breath the speech pleads that what accumulated over generations cannot be erased in four years, while its author asks Nigerians for four more.
The destination moves every time the people draw near. In the desert, that is called a mirage.
Then the final command: no looking back. But in the Exodus, the people looked back because they were hungry, and Heaven answered with bread, not with a rebuke. In a republic, looking back is the duty of every citizen before he votes.
In a republic, looking back is not apostasy. It is accountability, and its instrument is the ballot.
A government that forbids the people to look back is a government afraid of what they will see.
THE MAN WHO HAS MANAGED A CROSSING BEFORE
Nigerians do not need another sermon. They need a man who has already taken this economy across hard water and brought the people with him.
As Vice President, Atiku Abubakar chaired the National Economic Council under the Constitution and the National Council on Privatisation under the Public Enterprises Act. In those years Nigeria’s economy grew from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars in 2007. Foreign reserves rose from 3.7 billion dollars to about 45 billion dollars. The Paris Club settlement of 2005 wrote off 18 billion dollars, and Nigeria exited that debt in 2006. Inflation stood at 5.4 per cent in 2007.
That era also knew what real foreign investment looks like. In 2001, GSM licences were auctioned at 285 million dollars each, and the money built towers in every state, not bank balances waiting for the next exit.
What he will do now is written down. Welfare and security are his two first priorities, because a government’s fundamental duty is the life and livelihood of its citizens. The Atiku Economic Recovery Plan sets the subsidy on production, not on importation, with an audit the public can read. And he will empower the states to compete and attain their full potential, so that prosperity is built where the people live, not announced from Abuja.
Moses was given manna for the journey. Nigerians have been given a sermon. On 16 January 2027, they can choose bread.
There are 108 days to the presidential election. Collect your PVC. Guard your vote. And when you stand in that queue, look back, look hard, and then vote forward.
#Atiku2027 #NoMannaNoMandate #ADC #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
1 October 2026
