Tinubu to World Bank: We’ve Chosen the Hard Road. We’re Not Turning Back Now

On a warm Tuesday inside the State House in Abuja, the cameras flashed, chairs shuffled, and the room slowly settled. At one end of the long table sat President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. At the other, a high-powered World Bank team led by Anna Bjerde, the institution’s Managing Director of Operations.

He didn’t waste much time. No long preamble. Tinubu’s message was blunt: Nigeria has stepped into a difficult tunnel of economic reform, and there will be no retreat. Not now. Not later.

The President spoke like a man who knows the cost of his own decisions. Fuel subsidies gone. Exchange rates merged. Prices shooting up. People complaining in markets, in buses, online. He acknowledged it. The early phase was brutal, he said in so many words. But he also insisted that the worst of the adjustment is already behind the country, and that turning back would be far more dangerous than pressing on.

Once you have your hands on the plough, you don’t drop it halfway, he told his visitors. Winners, he implied, are not the ones who run when things get rough. That kind of language. Simple, but heavy.

He painted Nigeria as more than just another country on the map. “This is the heart of Africa,” he said, noting its massive population and deep natural resources. With that kind of scale, he suggested, reform is not just a policy choice. It’s something that, sooner or later, becomes unavoidable. You either fix the structure, or the structure will fix you.

And for him, fixing starts from the ground. Literally. Farmlands. Youth. Tools. Tinubu kept circling back to agriculture and young people, almost like a drumbeat. Nigeria has millions of young citizens and vast arable land, he reminded the room. If you put tractors, good seeds and affordable fertiliser in the right hands, you don’t just grow crops; you grow jobs, calm tensions, and build real wealth.

He described plans to set up zonal mechanisation centres scattered around the country, hubs where farmers can access modern equipment instead of relying on crude, back-breaking methods. He talked about distributing stronger, improved seedlings. He pointed to rising petrochemical production that could be turned into more available and cheaper local fertiliser.

The goal, he explained, is to push farmers beyond survival-mode. Away from tiny plots feeding only one family. Toward large cooperatives, organised and powerful, able to feed cities and even export, creating employment for others.

“How do we help ordinary farmers move from buying fertiliser in small bits to joining big cooperatives that give them better prices and real opportunities?” he asked, almost like he was thinking out loud. The question was aimed directly at the World Bank team. He urged them to look closely at seed development, mechanisation, and value chains that can turn rural effort into real money.

Then he pulled back to the bigger picture. These reforms, he said, rest on three big pillars: transparency, accountability and a market-driven approach. He sounded almost stubborn on this point. No more hiding behind subsidy games. No more multiple exchange rates that reward a few and punish everyone else. Those systems, he admitted, made it easy for smart and sometimes corrupt players to make “quick gains.” But they were also slowly poisoning the wider economy.

So they were dismantled. It hurt. Inflation jumped. Households struggled. But Tinubu insisted that the storm is beginning to calm. Inflation, which raced upward after the reforms, had started to ease, he noted, while the naira has become more stable. He argued that these shifts are already improving investor confidence and making it a bit easier to do business in and out of Nigeria. Not perfect, but better than before, he suggested.

Still, reforms alone won’t be enough if money for real projects keep moving at snail speed. That was why he pressed the World Bank team to move faster and think bolder. He called for innovative types of financing, fewer bureaucratic bottlenecks, and more tools to reduce the risks for private investors who want to come in but are still scared of uncertainty. Skills development, he added, must sit at the center of this partnership; young Nigerians need not just jobs, but the abilities that make those jobs sustainable.

“How you can speed up growth in this partnership matters a lot to me,” he said, making it clear that Nigeria is ready for deeper engagement, at almost any hour.

When Anna Bjerde spoke, she did not sound skeptical. She sounded impressed. She praised what she described as steady, disciplined and brave reform leadership in Nigeria over the last two years. In her travels and meetings with presidents, ministers and investors, she said, Nigeria now comes up often—as an example of a country that chose tough reforms and did not simply abandon them when they started to bite.

The results, she said, are “really commendable.” Even when implementation was politically and socially hard, there was, in her words, no turning back. That kind of consistency, she argued, gives both citizens and investors a sense of direction and clarity.

Bjerde explained that the World Bank’s upcoming Country Partnership Framework with Nigeria will be built firmly on Nigeria’s own vision: an economy heading toward the $1 trillion mark, with annual growth around seven percent. Big ambitions, yes. But she did not treat them as fantasy.

Jobs, she stressed, will be at the center of this new deal. With Africa’s youthful population surging, employment is no longer just an economic target; it’s a social necessity. Under this framework, infrastructure, agricultural transformation, access to finance for small and medium businesses, and investment in human development will form the backbone of the Bank’s engagement with Nigeria.

She laid out some numbers. The World Bank’s public sector portfolio in Nigeria currently stands at about $17 billion. On the private side, investments routed through the International Finance Corporation have grown to roughly $5 billion each year. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency is also expanding its presence, offering more guarantees and insurance tools designed to reduce risks and pull in even more private capital.

Bjerde also revealed that the Bank is preparing a fresh budget-support operation for Nigeria—essentially aligning its financing more directly with the government’s reform agenda, and building on instruments that had been revived for this very purpose.

Nigeria’s Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, added his own perspective. This meeting, he said, came at a crucial moment, as Nigeria and the World Bank are finalising their joint framework for 2026 to 2032. It is not just about loans anymore, he suggested, but a shared agenda for deep structural transformation and sustainable growth.

He argued that the wide-ranging reforms under Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda have already repositioned the economy for long-term resilience. Rating agencies and global investors, Edun noted, are beginning to take notice in concrete ways.

The new framework, he said, will focus on big-ticket infrastructure, transport networks, reliable power, modernised agriculture, stronger human capital, and digitalisation. And there is a quiet but important shift underway: Nigeria is gradually moving away from heavy dependence on sovereign borrowing toward mobilising large-scale private investment, with government acting as a catalyst to reduce risk.

In that transition, Edun stressed, the World Bank remains a trusted partner—one expected to scale up guarantees, blended finance and risk-sharing models that could unlock billions of dollars more in global capital. The very presence of such a high-level delegation in Abuja, he added, was itself a signal of confidence in Tinubu’s leadership and the direction of the reforms.

Now, the challenge is simple and hard at the same time: keep going. No pause. No U-turns. Just the long, uncomfortable walk through the tunnel Tinubu himself has chosen, in the hope that the light on the other side is as bright as promised.