By Tajudeen Kareem
Somewhere in Nigeria today, a university student is sitting in a lecture hall because the Nigerian Education Loan Fund paid her fees in full — interest-free — and sent her a monthly upkeep allowance on top. She is one of 1.66 million applicants to a scheme that has now disbursed over ₦322 billion to students and institutions.
Somewhere else, a civil servant is driving a CNG vehicle he could never have bought with cash, courtesy of a consumer credit corporation that deployed ₦30 billion within months of opening its doors.
In Lagos, a mother is buying staple foods at up to 40 percent below market price at an Ounje Eko discount market. Millions of vulnerable households have received direct cash transfers under a reformed social register. A Vulnerable Group Fund exists at the National Health Insurance Authority precisely so that indigent Nigerians are not destroyed by hospital bills.
Now ask the average citizen — the one stuck in traffic, staring at food prices, scrolling through outrage — what their government has done for them lately. The answer, more often than not, is silence. Or worse: a categorical, confident “nothing.”
That gap between a government that exists on paper and a government that exists in public consciousness is the single greatest failure of the Tinubu administration. Not policy. Communication.
The numbers are not in dispute. The disbursements are real, dashboarded, verifiable. What is missing is the narration — and in the vacuum, outrage has moved in and taken permanent residence.
A Ruling Party With an Opposition’s Psyche
Here is the deeper problem, and it predates this presidency. Since the APC took power from the PDP in 2015, an opposition mentality has never left its psyche. It governs like a party still campaigning — perpetually defensive, perpetually hunting enemies, perpetually fighting yesterday’s battles. In over a decade at the centre, we have rarely heard the APC sound like a winner. What we hear instead is defensiveness.
Its media foot soldiers behave like attack dogs rather than strategic communicators. Enormous energy — and national resources — go into identifying and checkmating perceived enemies and reacting to whatever the opposition said last.
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Meanwhile, the actual machinery of government, the safety nets already running, goes uncommunicated. And the contagion has spread: this posture has rubbed off on the media itself, exposing even hitherto respected professionals as divisive and, in some cases, openly bigoted.
A government that communicates like an opposition will be judged like an opposition — on promises and grievances, never on record.
Announcement Is Not Communication
The administration’s habit is to launch a policy with fanfare and then abandon it narratively. A press release is issued, a headline is earned, and then nothing. There is no sustained, citizen-level explanation of who qualifies, where to go, how to apply. So millions of Nigerians who could benefit from NELFUND, CREDICORP, the CCT or the NHIA fund simply do not know these doors exist — and assume no safety net exists at all.
In communication, a vacuum is never empty for long. It is filled by whoever tells the most emotionally compelling story. Right now, that is not the government.
What Winning Would Look Like
The fix is not more spokespersons — the presidency has already restructured its media team, and structure without strategy is just reorganized noise. The fix is a change of posture, and it is not complicated:
Tell human stories, not statistics. One hundred and sixty-six ten-thousands of loan applicants is an abstraction. Aisha, whose fees were paid, is a story. No figure should ever appear without a face attached.
Show, don’t tell. NELFUND already publishes daily disbursement reports. Extend that radical transparency across every program — and include the gaps. Verifiable data is the only propaganda-proof communication there is.
Go where the outrage lives. Press statements live in Abuja; anger lives in markets, campuses and vernacular radio phone-ins. Meet citizens there — to answer, not to lecture.
Acknowledge pain before citing progress. Communicating macroeconomic wins to citizens in acute distress, without first acknowledging the distress, is not communication. It is gaslighting.
Disown the bigots. Every divisive outburst from an allied voice taints even accurate information by association. The messenger problem has become a message problem.
An Honest Word on Trade-offs
Finally, to those demanding overnight transformation: there is an honest frame available that this government has never used. Every bullet fired by security forces in counter-insurgency and policing operations is capital that could otherwise have funded schools, hospitals and subsidized food.
Citizens are adults. They can hold two truths at once — that the adjustment is painful, and that the state is spending heavily just to keep the peace. But they can only hold those truths if someone trusts them enough to speak them.
The Bottom Line
No administration pleases 100 percent of its citizenry, particularly during painful structural adjustment. Execution gaps persist — this government is far from flawless. But a government that has moved ₦322 billion into students’ futures and ₦30 billion into citizens’ hands should not be losing the argument to silence.
The policies exist. The machinery is running. What is missing is a government willing to narrate itself — in the language of beneficiaries, on the channels where citizens actually live, with the transparency that makes the story impossible to dismiss.
Until the APC shifts from reaction to agenda-setting, from attack dogs to storytellers, the presidency will keep losing the narrative — no matter how much money has actually been disbursed.
We need winners who govern like winners. It is time they started sounding like it.
*Kareem is a public policy analyst
