Which is the more significant milestone? Three years into the Tinubu administration? Or the prospect, next year, of another general election? In fact, some will reject this tension as a false one. Are both not but different faces of the same checkpoint in Nigeria’s development? True, in the sense in which Janus looked both towards the back and ahead at the same time. However, the urge, at this point in the country’s history, is to look ahead. Still, it won’t hurt to look back. And not just because the phase that the Tinubu administration was allegedly going to put its imprimatur on three years ago, was supposed to have been an important one.

A former governor of Lagos State, whose progressive ways had altered the nation’s commercial capital was finally going to get a chance at modernising the country. He, was, according to one of the more charming chronicles bruited about in his bid for the presidency, going to sunder the leash with which “the Hausa-Fulani oligarchy” has continued to hold back the Nigerian state. El Dorado was not promised. But at least some level of competence in the management of the state and merit in the assignment of its scarcest resource were suggested.

All of this, even as the campaign anchored its bid for power on some of the most terrible abuse of the nation’s ethnic fault lines in recent history. If the inflammation of ethno-national differences by the Tinubu campaign was an inopportune failing, the “Lagos as template” for the administration’s intervention in the larger federal space was a more forthright argument. For context, in the early 1990s, the UAE developed a systematic strategy built around an open trade regime, low taxation, deregulation, infrastructure and an open labour market. As a result of which, according to the IMF the UAE’s non-oil economy grew at about 8 per cent annually from 1995 onward. Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu became Lagos State governor in 1999.

The nature of our federalism, however, always meant that there were limits to what subnational governments could do to better their respective economies in absolute terms. Nevertheless, even as a relative possibility, what did the Tinubu government do in Lagos? Reform the bureaucracy as part of a process of bringing down the cost of doing business in the state? Eliminate the burden on businesses posed by non-state actors? No. Instead, his administration superintended over a massive reallocation of resources from businesses and consumers to government coffers. Indeed, so powerful was the strength of his example that the raising of internally generated revenue (IGR) became the raison d’être of subnational governments at the time.

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This boost to government’s earnings is the leitmotif of Mr Tinubu’s stint at running the federal government. More money for government. Not what government should do with the additional resources. Nor how to go about doing that “what”. The tension between means and ends at the heart of the Tinubu government goes further. How does a pro-democracy activist who cut his teeth in opposition to the Abacha military junta’s taste for using whatever was at hand to get whatever it wanted, not understand that this way of going about things can only damage a democracy? This is not just a question of recognising that a desirable outcome does not necessarily justify every method of achieving it. It is more of the realisation that there is what works, and there is the requirement to do it in a way that is legitimate, ethical, and institutionally acceptable.

Not everything that is legal is expedient, then? This is the lesson from the Trump presidency in the US Suddenly, the world has awakened to the fact that the restraints under which previous US presidents exercised their authority were not enshrined in law. They were but norms whose burdens were freely accepted in the interest of the collective well-being. Narcissism is not the only change against Mr Donald Trump. A bumbling incompetence is arguably the most important. Not surprisingly, these were charges that the Abacha administration was also open to. And which have been laid before the Tinubu government. The strain between efficacy and legitimacy is one which governments will perennially struggle to resolve. A government may know what needs doing yet face a difficult question about how it can do it without undermining the very institutions, rules, or values it is supposed to protect.

Against an opposition far less competent than his government has been, Mr Tinubu is almost guaranteed re-election next year. And high on that possibility some of his backers have stumbled on a new storyline. That the shortcomings of his first term were a necessary consequence of the need to compensate the many people, interests, and channels that smoothed his way to office in 2023. Accordingly, with all his debts repaid in full, Mr Tinubu’s second term will be more favourable to Nigeria and Nigerians.

The problem is that we have been told this tale before, from governments that are largely remembered for the myriad opportunities they missed to fix the country.

Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.