TINUBU'S ADMINISTRATION: AN "EXTENSION" OF BUHARI'S DISASTROUS INTERREGNUM OF LEADERSHIP AND A DECADE OF APC'S RULE OR RUIN ?

Nigeria’s current economic hardship and security malaise did not begin with President Bola Ahmed. 

Tinubu, but many Nigerians experience his administration as the continuation, and consolidation of the failures of President Muhammadu Buhari.

In that sense, Tinubu’s government is widely framed as an extension of Buhari’s disastrous leadership: a decade-long leadership interregnum in which governance often appeared suspended between promises and outcomes, between democratic ritual and tangible state capacity. The result is a country facing worsening cost of living pressures, fragile public trust, and persistent insecurity - conditions that feel less like a temporary storm and more like the settled climate of the era.

This “interregnum” is not the absence of leaders; Nigeria has had presidents, ministers, budgets, and slogans. It is the absence of effective leadership understood as the competent and ethical direction of the state toward the common good.

Aristotle’s political philosophy offers a useful lens here. In Politics, he argues that the aim of the city is not mere survival but “living well,” and that the legitimacy of government rests on whether it governs in the common interest rather than for the benefit of a few. Put differently, leadership is judged by outcomes that improve collective welfare, not by rhetoric, pedigree, or electoral victory.

Many Nigerians judge the Buhari years as a period when the state drifted away from Aristotle’s standard. Buhari came to power in 2015 with a powerful moral narrative, discipline, anti-corruption, security restoration and anchored his political campaign and manifesto on 'Change'. Yet, by the end of his tenure, the economy had endured repeated shocks, poverty deepened, and insecurity metastasised across regions.

The promise of a corrective administration gave way to a lived reality of widening vulnerability. The “interregnum” label captures this gap: a space where the appearance of governance persisted but the substance policy coherence, institutional performance, protection of life and property, and social progress was frequently and persistently absent.

Tinubu, on the other hand promised a 'Renewed Hope' in 2023, a political 'mantra' bait, was therefore not a clean break but a complicated inheritance. His early policy choices, particularly the abrupt removal of fuel subsidies and the foreign exchange reforms that weakened the naira, were defended as long-overdue structural corrections. But reforms, Aristotle would remind us, are not self-justifying. If the goal of politics is the flourishing of the community, then reforms must be judged by how they distribute pain and gain, how they protect the most vulnerable, and whether they strengthen the state’s ability to provide security and basic welfare.

For millions, the immediate effects were spiraling transport costs, rising food prices, eroded wages, and a sense that the state demanded sacrifice without providing credible protection from hardship. It serves as a total disconnect between the economic reforms and the reality of economic turmoil, which emasculates the purchasing power of ordinary Nigerians. 

The economic crisis now reads like a continuum of policy fragility rather than a single administration’s mistake. Buhari’s era was characterised by heavy central bank interventionism, opaque fiscal choices, expanding debt burdens, and a petroleum-dependent economy with weak domestic productivity.

Tinubu’s administration inherited that structure, and intensified the shock by removing a key price cushion (subsidy) at a time when wages, social protections, and production capacity were not prepared to absorb the impact. In theory, removing subsidies can free resources for development; in practice, Nigerians needed to see the freed resources transparently converted into public goods: reliable power, efficient mass transit, targeted cash transfers that actually reach people, and visible improvements in healthcare and education. Where such conversion appears slow, uneven, or poorly communicated, the public experiences reform not as progress but as punishment.

Plato’s warnings about leadership and the moral psychology of rulers help explain why public trust has been so hard to rebuild. In The Republic, Plato critiques political orders that collapse into rule by appetite, where leaders pursue power, wealth, and status, and the city becomes an arena for factional competition rather than justice. The famous line often paraphrased as “the price of not taking part in politics is to be ruled by your inferiors” captures a civic anxiety: when the best people withdraw from public life, governance can be captured by those driven by narrower interests or 'Agberos - the Motor Park touts' Whether or not one agrees with Plato’s elitism, his insight into legitimacy remains relevant: leadership loses credibility when citizens believe the state serves insiders while asking ordinary people to endure deprivation.

In Nigeria’s last decade, perceptions of elite insulation have been central. Under Buhari, narratives of austerity often clashed with images of political privilege. Under Tinubu, the call for Nigerians to endure short-term pain has competed with concerns about the size of government, the recycling of political networks, the reward of political patronage, and the opacity of some fiscal decisions.

This perception gap matters because economic management is not only a technical exercise; it is a moral and political one. When trust is low, even necessary reforms are read as predatory. Aristotle emphasises that stable government depends on a strong middle class and moderation; policies that compress the middle and expand desperation fuel volatility and crime and weaken the social contract.

Nigeria’s security crisis further reinforces the sense of a decade-long drift. Buhari came in as a former military general with a mandate to defeat insurgency and restore order. Yet insecurity widened: Boko Haram and ISWAP persisted; banditry escalated in the North-West; farmer-herder conflict deepened in the Middle Belt; separatist violence and heavy-handed responses inflamed tensions in the South-East; piracy and kidnapping remained threats; and urban crime grew alongside economic stress. Security is the first responsibility of the state; when citizens begin to self-insure through private guards, vigilantes, or communal retaliation, the idea of a unified political community weakens.

Tinubu inherited this fractured landscape and has promised new strategies, but public evaluation hinges on measurable outcomes: fewer kidnappings, safer highways, restored farming and trade routes, and professionalised policing. Aristotle’s definition of tyranny, rule exercised for the ruler’s interest rather than the common good need not imply dictatorship to be instructive. It can also describe systems where the security apparatus is perceived as politically selective, ineffective for ordinary citizens, or more responsive to elite interests. The deeper issue is state capacity: can government reliably protect lives, enforce law fairly, and deliver justice? When the answer appears uncertain, fear becomes a daily tax on economic activity, investment, and community life.

Economic distress and insecurity feed each other. Inflation pushes more people into desperation; desperation fuels criminal recruitment and communal conflict; insecurity disrupts agriculture and logistics; disrupted supply pushes prices up further. This cycle is what makes the present moment feel like an “interregnum”: not merely poor performance but a pattern in which dysfunction reproduces itself. Plato describes a city’s decay when appetites overrule reason; in modern terms, when governance becomes reactive, politicised, and short-term, the system loses the rational capacity to plan and execute. Nigeria’s recurring crises, currency instability, fuel scarcity episodes, food price spikes, and repeated security emergencies, suggest a state stuck in fire-fighting mode without durable institutional remedies.

Tinubu’s defenders argue that he is attempting the hard changes Buhari avoided—particularly on subsidy removal and exchange rates, and that the pain is inevitable. The critique, however, is that the administration has not built sufficient legitimacy or cushioning mechanisms to make the reforms socially sustainable. Aristotle would call this a failure of phronesis 'practical wisdom or good moral judgement ', where good ends require careful timing, proportion, and attention to the lived conditions of citizens. Even when a policy is economically rational, implementing it without a credible social bargain can destabilise the polity.

A leadership interregnum also manifests in the weakening of institutions. Anti-corruption messaging under Buhari often appeared selective, while accountability systems struggled to convince citizens that rule of law was applied equally. Under Tinubu, Nigerians look for signals that governance is becoming more transparent, not less: open budgeting, procurement reform, stronger legislative oversight, and an empowered judiciary. Plato feared the corruption of the guardians; modern democracies avoid this by dispersing power and enforcing accountability. When institutions are seen as extensions of political loyalty rather than neutral arbiters, citizens retreat into cynicism, identity politics, or survival strategies.

The core question, then, is whether Tinubu will remain historically tethered to Buhari’s legacy or create a real break through measurable improvements. A decisive break would require more than macroeconomic announcements. It would require a social contract that aligns sacrifice with fairness. Nigerians can endure hardship when they believe leaders share the burden and the system is moving somewhere coherent. That means credible and targeted social protection, wage and productivity strategies, genuine support for small businesses, and an aggressive push for energy reliability and local production. It also means security sector reform: intelligence-led policing, accountability for abuses, better welfare for security personnel, and coordination across federal and state levels, paired with justice systems that actually prosecute crimes.

Plato and Aristotle ultimately converge on a simple demand: leadership must be morally serious. Plato’s insistence that rulers must be guided by wisdom and justice, not appetite, and Aristotle’s insistence that government exists for the common good, provide a yardstick that citizens instinctively use. When Nigerians describe the last decade as disastrous, they are not only listing statistics; they are describing a moral experience of abandonment, of unequal pain, of promises that do not translate into safety or dignity.

Tinubu’s administration may argue it is correcting the distortions of Buhari’s years, but to many Nigerians, the continuity is more visible than the change. The economic squeeze feels like the culmination of long mismanagement; insecurity feels like the normalisation of fear. That is why the era is increasingly narrated as a decade of interregnum: leadership present in form, absent in effect.

History, however, is not yet concluded. If Tinubu can convert reform into shared prosperity by restoring purchasing power, stabilising the currency through credible production and export strategies, and reducing insecurity in ways that people can measure in their daily lives, he can rupture the inherited narrative. If not, his presidency will likely be remembered as the second act of a single story: a prolonged season in which Nigeria’s politics continued, but Nigerians’ sense of “living well,” in Aristotle’s meaning, kept slipping out of reach, and Plato’s warning about cities ruled by appetite, not reason, felt uncomfortably close to home.

By Comrade Benjamin Alao, 

Lawyer and political analyst.