Goodbye to a bittersweet year, welcome 2026 of action

The year 2026, just a few hours ahead, must be one marked by action. Nigerians want action from the government that will touch their lives positively. The government, in turn, expects a great deal from its citizens. From the hope of 2025, Nigerians will witness measurable action that will lift living standards and transform lives. […]

The year 2026, just a few hours ahead, must be one marked by action. Nigerians want action from the government that will touch their lives positively. The government, in turn, expects a great deal from its citizens. From the hope of 2025, Nigerians will witness measurable action that will lift living standards and transform lives. Before then, let us bid farewell to 2025.

For ordinary Nigerians, 2025 has been neither a year of prosperity nor one of complete economic collapse. It was rather a year of uneasy balance. For many of them, the year ending today was an incongruous one: they experienced stubborn hardship, amid signs of stability that slowly emerged.

It was a year in which many economic indices diverged from what they said on paper. Consequently, people felt the bitterness in the high cost of living, although inflation was falling. They started the year with inflation at 34.8 per cent on January 1, and by December, it had come down to 14.45 per cent. Yet, for most of the time, food prices stayed painfully high, forcing households to make daily trade-offs between quantity, quality, and necessity. So, we had a peculiar case where inflation eased, but prices did not fall or refused to fall in tandem with the decline in inflation.

Somehow, house owners, almost in agreement, raised their rents, just as transport fares rose and refused to come down. You also remember the new reality of electricity pricing, which has become a major item on the family’s monthly expenditure. Many do not need to be told what it costs now to keep children in school.

In the meantime, salaries failed to keep pace with the price increases. Apart from a few cases where workers received income adjustments, most Nigerian workers went through the year on the same salaries on which they started the year. That meant that inflation, even though it was going down, still took away part of the value of those constant salaries and wages.

For the businesses, high interest rates intensified these pressures. The CBN maintained its tight monetary policy stance for the first eight months of the year, with the MPC at 27.5 per cent. At that rate, most companies could only access bank credit at interest rates as high as 35 per cent, according to industry sources. This did not change much after the reduction in the MPR in September to 27 per cent. So, loans became expensive for most of the year.

However, the year was not entirely about bitterness. There was a lot to cheer about, some sweetness here and there. The fact that inflation started to move southward was quite comforting, at least policy-wise. It brought some relief that, after all, the stabilisation policies had started to yield results. It brought psychological relief to both the policymakers and the citizens. Ours is an economy given to violent and sometimes huge price shocks. The change in the direction of prices matters.

For one thing, this has given all of us- businesses, households, and even the government – the confidence to plan, at least to some extent. The stability in the exchange rate of the naira, for instance, has stabilised the foreign exchange market, and with that has come a clarity that helps everyone find the path to tomorrow. With this, we now have greater clarity in the macroeconomic environment. There is a unified and predictable exchange-rate system that has reduced uncertainty.  It was just a few years ago, as everything was in flux.

Perhaps the most important sweetness of 2025 was the return of cautious hope. Even among skeptics, there was a growing acknowledgment that difficult reforms were finally being confronted rather than deferred. Many citizens understood that postponing hard decisions would have deepened long-term pain. The idea that today’s discomfort could lay the foundation for tomorrow’s stability began to gain acceptance, if not yet full confidence.

However, this hope alone is not enough. Nigerians, the ordinary Nigerians, are entering 2026 with a clear expectation: that stability seen above must now translate into relief. Slowing inflation must give way to falling prices or rising incomes. Fiscal discipline must be seen in better public services, and the reset promised by President Bola Tinubu must be seen in practical terms. In this regard, revenue mobilisation must be matched by visible accountability. Without these, the bitterness of reform risks overwhelming its sweetness.

Looking back, 2025 was indeed a year of endurance. Nigerians adjusted, adapted, and absorbed shocks with characteristic resilience. But resilience should not be mistaken for satisfaction. The true value of 2025 will be seen in the actions of 2026 and their impact on the people. Will the sacrifices made by ordinary Nigerians finally yield tangible improvements in living standards, or will their patience be stretched beyond its limits?