JamzNG Latest News, Gist, Entertainment in Nigeria
Text of lecture delivered by Mr. Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu, Governor of Lagos State, at the 7th Annual Freedom Online Conference, Sheraton Lagos Hotel, Ikeja, Thursday 3 September 2026.
Protocols.
1. I would like to begin with the chairman of this occasion, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, who has spent almost eight years as this country’s chief communicator and who knows better than anyone in this room how narrow and how important the terrain can be between government and the press.
2. To the special guest of honour, Senator Gbenga Daniel, who has governed Ogun State for eight years and now legislates for it, and who therefore understands the peculiar arithmetic of a governorship, where every problem in the State comes to a table and the table is never big enough.
3. To the Chief Guest, Mr. Eze Anaba, President of the Nigerian Publishers Guild and Editor of Vanguard. And to our guest, Mr. Gabriel Akinadewo, and the management and staff of Swaaya Limited, publisher of Freedom Online: Thank you for the invitation and for the trust it represents.
4. I did my homework before coming here. Since its inception in 2017, this conference has addressed unemployment, leadership, Nigeria’s place in the world, politics and democracy, and the social contract. This is not a random list of topics. It’s a record of a platform that has continued to ask the toughest questions about this country and refused to settle for easy answers. I’m honored to add to that record.
5. I have been asked to speak on the topic “2027 Elections: Nigeria’s Economy, Security and Future” and I want to be honest, from the outset, about the points of view from which I speak.
6. I speak as a technocrat, with more than two decades in public service, much of it spent preparing budgets, negotiating concessions and building infrastructure in the most demanding city on this continent.
7. I speak as a politician, who stood before the electorate twice and was given double confidence, and who is now leading his party to the 2027 elections in Lagos State.
8. And I speak as a governor in the final months of his second and final term, whose name will not appear on any ballot in 2027. That fact gives me some freedom this morning, and I intend to take advantage of it. I’m not here to ask for your vote. I’m here to ask for your attention and, before we finish, for something a little more difficult than that.
9. I will not pretend to be neutral. I am a proud member of the All-Progressives Congress. I believe in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s reforms and I will say so clearly. But I will try to speak first as a Nigerian and only then as a partisan, because I think this is what the topic deserves and what this audience expects.
10. Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to start with the number that should frame everything we say today. That number is twenty-eight.
11. When the polls open in January, this Fourth Republic will be twenty-eight years old. Consider what this means. The First Republic lasted five years and a few months, from independence in October 1960 to the coup d’état in January 1966. The Second Republic lasted four years and three months.
12. The Third Republic gave us elected governors and an elected National Assembly, but never got to an elected President. Adding these three elements together, this Republic has lasted more than twice as long as all of them combined.
13. The 2027 election will be the eighth consecutive general election since 1999. One of those elections, in 2015, produced something this country has never seen: an incumbent president who admits defeat and hands himself over, peacefully, to the opposition.
14. We should say these things out loud, because we live in a neighborhood where they can no longer be taken for granted. Over the past six years, soldiers have seized power in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Niger, and most recently in Guinea-Bissau. Three of these countries have exited ECOWAS altogether. In a region where the polls are under siege, Nigeria’s uninterrupted run of elections provides the anchor, and it’s fair to say.
15. None of this was free. This democracy was paid for by people who were detained, exiled and, in some cases, killed for it. The President knows this better than most; he spent years in exile for the June 12 cause. So when we talk about 2027, let’s talk about it with the seriousness it deserves. It’s another milestone on a road that many people didn’t live to see.
16. We are now 135 days away from those elections. The presidential campaign officially opened on August 19. The governorship campaigns will open in six days, on September 9. The season is upon us and the two questions that will define it are exactly the two on this morning’s program: the economy and security.
17. Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, we have already seen the shape of the campaign. Just two weeks later, opposition politicians chose the fuel subsidy as their instrument of choice. We’ll see more. We will see promises that no treasure on earth could honor. We will see coalitions form, dissolve, and reform, sometimes within the same week. This has been the pattern of every election season in this country, and 2027 will be no exception.
18. So let me address the subsidy directly, because Nigerians deserve better than slogans on both fronts.
19. The subsidy wasn’t taken away because someone liked taking it away. It was removed because it had become a hole in the national coffers through which money for roads, schools and hospitals was drying up, and because much of that money never reached the ordinary motorist it was supposed to help. In the 2023 elections, all major candidates have promised to remove him. Only one of them was able to do this, and he did it on his first day in office.
20. I’m not going to sit here and tell you it was painless. It’s not like that. Lagosians have felt it at the pump, at the market and in the price of a sack of rice, and any governor who tells you otherwise has not listened to his own people. But the measure of a reform is not whether it hurts. It’s whether he heals. And the evidence that this is healing is coming, quarter after quarter.
21. The Office for National Statistics released growth data for the second quarter of this year on Monday. The economy grew by 4.43%, compared to 3.89% in the first quarter and 4.23% in the same quarter last year. Agriculture, the sector on which the majority of our population depends, grew by 4.39%, compared to 2.82% the previous year. Services grew by 4.6%. In nominal terms, the economy is 18% larger than it was twelve months ago.
22. Look beyond the headline and the image holds up. Last week our external reserves stood at $53 billion, the highest level since January 2009. We are running a trade surplus. Fitch and Moody’s both upgraded Nigeria’s credit ratings last year. Inflation, which peaked at nearly 35% at the end of 2024, was 15.9% in June. The naira has held its position against the dollar for much of the year. And the era of unpaid government employees, unpaid retirees, and abandoned federal projects is behind us.
23. Also this week, the Central Bank reported that Nigerians abroad sent home $947 million through formal channels in July. This is the largest monthly figure in our history, and it’s just shy of the $1 billion a month goal that many people laughed at when it was set two years ago.
24. These are not my numbers. They belong to the National Bureau of Statistics and the Central Bank of Nigeria and every journalist in this room can check them. I invite you to. This, ultimately, is the difference between a cause based on facts and a campaign based on fear.
Post views:
16
