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By O’tega ‘The Tiger’ Ogra
Economic reform is never painless. Every nation that has fixed deep distortions faced the same choice: take the hard medicine early, or delay and pay much more later.
Some politicians today are selling the “gentle” path. Peter Obi says keep subsidies for a while, Atiku Abubakar says guide the currency quietly, Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir El-Rufai say push the hard work into another year. It sounds safe. But history is clear and that road ends in disaster.
Bulgaria tried it in 1990. They freed some prices but kept subsidies, exactly as Peter Obi proposes. They held a soft currency peg without the reserves to defend it, just as Atiku suggests for the naira.
They delayed tough reforms like Amaechi and El-Rufai advise. Six years later, inflation had exploded past 2,000 percent, the currency was worthless, shops were empty, pensions were destroyed, and the politicians who promised a soft landing had vanished.
Nigeria today is on a different road. From his first day in office, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu removed the petrol subsidy draining over four trillion naira a year, let the naira find its real value, restored fiscal discipline, and cleared over seven billion dollars in FX backlogs.
Those decisions brought Nigeria off IATA’s blacklist, attracted $5.6 billion in inflows in late 2024, more than the previous two years combined, and grew non-oil tax revenue by more than twenty percent.
These are real wins, already happening. Yet this is the moment when the Association of Displaced Politicians will tell us to stop. They will push Bulgaria 1990 in a new wrapper. They will push it as an “acceptable” naira rate, a “phased” subsidy removal, slowing reforms to “protect the people.” In reality, it is comfort now and collapse later.
We have seen this film before. Nigeria must hold the line. Keep subsidy savings transparent and tied to visible projects. Keep the currency market-driven. Keep monetary policy tight until inflation falls within a credible band. This is how we earn lasting investor trust and create an economy that is resilient, competitive, and not hostage to oil prices alone.
The choice is simple. Pain now with a recovery we can see, or comfort now with a collapse we cannot control. Bulgaria 1990 is the warning. Nigeria 2023 is the opportunity. We are already making in months the progress that took years for others. If we have the discipline to finish this, we will not just avoid Bulgaria’s trap but we will write the modern African recovery story the world will study. This is the best time to Bet on Nigeria.
Read my thread below and a link to the full article at the end of the thread 
*Twitter Thread*: https://x.com/otegaogra/
*Full Article*: https://medium.com/
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