‘Renewed Hope’ Is an Economic Mirage – Otunba Babatunde Olushola Senbanjo Tells Nigerians to Reject APC

By Otunba (DR) Babatunde Olushola Senbanjo (BOS)

As Nigeria advances through 2026, the country stands at a critical historical junction.

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which initially secured power on the promise of sweeping “Change,” now anchors its survival on what it terms the “Renewed Hope Agenda”.

However, a professional and objective assessment of the administration’s core policies reveals a widening chasm between official performance metrics and the harrowing reality of daily survival for the ordinary citizen.

For a nation looking toward its long-term future, continuing under this governance framework represents a severe risk to fiscal sustainability and human security.
To salvage the Nigerian state, the electorate must look beyond party loyalty and decisively reject the current administration’s trajectory at the ballot box.

1. The Fiscal Mirage: Growth Without Development
The administration frequently highlights recent economic milestones, such as a 4.43% real GDP growth rate in Q2 2026 and a drop in official headline inflation to 15.43%. Yet, these figures mask a deeply flawed structural reality:

The Core Inflation Crisis: While headline statistics suggest moderation, the cost of basic food items such as tomatoes, yams, and staple grains remains prohibitively high

Subnational Disparities: The national average hides a severe regional crisis. Multiple states continue to struggle with severe local inflation, with some regions experiencing localised price shocks exceeding 30% to 40%.

The Real-World Cost of Reform: The abrupt removal of the fuel subsidy and the floating of the Naira have systematically eroded the purchasing power of the middle class and pushed millions into absolute poverty.

2. The Tax Reform Overreach and Fiscal Extravagance
Public finance under the APC has transitioned into a system that disproportionately burdens productive enterprise while failing to curb state-sponsored waste

Aggressive Tax Harmonisation: The administration’s aggressive push for new tax laws and fiscal harmonisation has squeezed struggling small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Rather than expanding the economic pie, the policy targets a shrinking pool of formal businesses

Ballooning National Debt: The newly proposed ₦58.18 trillion 2026 federal budget represents a massive scale-up in spending. This expansion relies heavily on debt accumulation and optimistic revenue projections, leaving future generations to shoulder the burden of servicing unproductive debts.

Unchecked Governance Waste: While citizens are told to “endure” economic adjustments to prevent a fiscal collapse, the political elite continues to fund duplicative administrative structures, luxurious official retinues, and opaque palliative schemes that lack transparent oversight.

3. The Security Deficit and the Agrarian Collapse
No government can claim success while failing in its primary constitutional duty: protecting lives and property. The APC’s approach to national security has fundamentally failed to secure the nation’s economic anchors:

Disruption of the Food Supply Chain: Continued banditry, kidnapping, and rural terror in Nigeria’s primary agricultural belts have driven farmers off their ancestral lands. This has created an artificial food scarcity that keeps prices high regardless of central bank monetary policies.

The Commercialisation of Terror: Kidnapping has become an institutionalised criminal economy. The state’s reliance on reactive kinetic measures, rather than systemic intelligence reform, leaves highways and rural communities highly vulnerable.

4. Institutional Decay and Selective Accountability
The administration’s anti-corruption posture has devolved into a tool for political consolidation:

Political Absolution: The ruling party has increasingly become a sanctuary where politicians facing major corruption allegations are granted political immunity and institutional cover when they switch allegiances.

Shrinking Civic Space: The state’s response to public dissent has grown highly defensive. From the systemic harassment of investigative journalists to the heavy-handed containment of peaceful protests, the open civic space necessary for a functional democracy is actively being dismantled.

Conclusion: The Imperative for a New Direction
The structural policies implemented under the APC administration are structurally unsustainable.

The current economic model relies on taxing an impoverished populace to sustain an expensive government. It celebrates abstract macroeconomic growth variables while ignoring the widespread misery across Nigerian households.
True renewal will not come from consolidating policies that treat citizens as economic shock absorbers. It requires a leadership model anchored on strict fiscal discipline, genuine public accountability, and a production-centred economy.

For Nigeria to thrive, the electorate must recognise the current administration’s trajectory for what it is: a path toward long-term stagnation and collectively reject it in pursuit of a functional nation.