Text of the lecture delivered by Mr. Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu, Governor of Lagos State, at the Freedom Online 7th Yearly Lecture, Sheraton Lagos Hotel, Ikeja, on Thursday, 3 September 2026…
I did my home work before coming here. Since its inception in 2017, this lecture has taken on unemployment, leadership, Nigeria’s place in the world, politics and democracy, and the social contract. That is not a random list of topics. It is the record of a platform that has kept asking the hardest questions about this country and has refused to settle for easy answers. I am honored to add to that record.
I have been asked to speak on the theme “2027 Elections: Economy, Security and Nigeria’s Future,” and I want to be honest, at the outset, about the vantage points from which I speak.
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.
I speak as a politician, who has stood before the electorate twice and been trusted twice, and who now leads his party into the 2027 elections in Lagos State.
And I speak as a governor in the final months of his second and last term, whose name will not appear on any ballot in 2027. That fact gives me a certain freedom this morning, and I intend to use it. I am not here to ask for your vote. I am here to ask for your attention and, before I finish, for something a little harder than that.
I will not pretend to be neutral. I am a proud member of the All-Progressives Congress. I believe in the reforms of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and I will say so plainly. But I will try to speak first as a Nigerian and only then as a partisan, because I think that is what the theme deserves and what this audience expects.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, let me begin with the number that should frame everything else we say today. That number is twenty-eight.
By the time the polls open in January, this Fourth Republic will be twenty-eight years old. Consider what that means. The First Republic lasted five years and a few months, from Independence in October 1960 to the coup of January 1966. The Second Republic lasted four years and three months.
The Third Republic gave us elected governors and an elected National Assembly, but never quite arrived at an elected President. Add those three together, and this Republic has now lasted more than twice as long as all of them combined.
The election of 2027 will be the eighth consecutive general election since 1999. One of those elections, in 2015, produced something this country had never seen: a sitting President conceding defeat and handing over, peacefully, to the opposition.
We should say these things out loud, because we live in a neighborhood where they can no longer be taken for granted. In the last six years, soldiers have seized power in Mali, in Guinea, in Burkina Faso and in Niger, and more recently in Guinea-Bissau. Three of those countries have walked out of ECOWAS altogether. In a region where the ballot box is under siege, Nigeria’s unbroken run of elections is the anchor, and we should say so.
None of it came 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 cause of June 12. So, when we speak about 2027, let us speak about it with the seriousness it deserves. It is one more milestone on a road that many people did not live to see.
That election is now 135 days away. The presidential campaign opened officially on the 19th of August. The governorship campaigns open in six days, on the 9th of September. 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.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, we have already seen the shape of the campaign. Barely two weeks in, opposition politicians have reached for the fuel subsidy as their instrument of choice. We will see more of this. We will see promises that no treasury on earth could honor. We will see coalitions form, dissolve and re-form, sometimes within the same week. This has been the pattern of every election season in this country, and 2027 will not be the exception.
So let me address the subsidy directly, because Nigerians deserve better than slogans on either side of it.
The subsidy was not removed because anybody enjoyed removing it. It was removed because it had become a hole in the national purse through which the money for roads, schools and hospitals was draining away, and because much of that money was never reaching the ordinary motorist it was supposed to help. In the 2023 election, every major candidate promised to remove it. Only one of them was in a position to do it, and he did it on his first day in office.
I will not stand here and tell you that it has been painless. It has not. Lagosians have felt it at the pump, at the market, and in the price of a bag of rice, and any governor who tells you otherwise has not been listening to his own people. But the measure of a reform is not whether it hurts. It is whether it heals. And the evidence that this one is healing is now arriving, quarter by quarter.
On Monday, the National Bureau of Statistics published the growth figures for the second quarter of this year. The economy grew by 4.43 per cent, up from 3.89 per cent in the first quarter and from 4.23 per cent in the same quarter of last year. Agriculture, the sector on which most of our people depend, grew by 4.39 per cent, up from 2.82 per cent a year earlier. Services grew by 4.6 per cent. In nominal terms, the economy is more than 18 per cent larger than it was twelve months ago.
Look past the headline and the picture holds. Our external reserves stood at 53 billion dollars last week, the highest they have been since January 2009. We are running a trade surplus. Fitch and Moody’s both upgraded Nigeria’s credit rating last year. Inflation, which peaked at almost 35 per cent at the end of 2024, was 15.9 per cent in June. The naira has held its ground against the dollar for the better part of a year. And the era of unpaid public servants, unpaid pensioners and abandoned federal projects is behind us.
This week, too, the Central Bank reported that Nigerians abroad sent home 947 million dollars through formal channels in the month of July. That is the largest monthly figure in our history, and it is within touching distance of the one-billion-dollar-a-month target that many people laughed at when it was set two years ago.
These are not my numbers. They belong to the National Bureau of Statistics and the Central Bank of Nigeria, and every journalist in this hall can check them. I invite you to. That, in the end, is the difference between a case built on facts and a campaign built on fear.
For us in the All Progressives Congress, the position that follows is a simple one. We intend to stay the course, to deepen the reforms, and to make sure that the benefits reach, quickly and visibly, the people who bore the cost.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, security will shape 2027 in two ways, and we should be clear-eyed about both.
The first is practical. In the communities where banditry and insurgency persist, insecurity touches everything: whether candidates can campaign, whether INEC can move its materials and its people safely, whether voters will come out at all. INEC’s own leadership has spoken openly about the threats to this election, and the Commission and the security agencies must plan for them now, not in December.
The second is a matter of perception. People vote on how safe they feel. And I believe Nigerians can see, because they are not blind, that this President has taken the security of this country as seriously as any Commander-in-Chief since 1999.
Consider what has been done in three years. In July, the President approved the expansion of the Nigerian Army from eight divisions to twelve, with 28,000 additional personnel and new divisional headquarters in Makurdi, Ilorin, Jalingo and Benin City, closer to the theatres where they are needed.
The Navy has a new Special Operations Command. Police training has been decentralized. Forest Guards and Mining Marshals now operate in spaces that were, for years, simply ungoverned. A new presidential office coordinates homeland security. And in May, in a joint operation with our American partners, some of the most wanted terrorist commanders in the Lake Chad Basin were taken off the battlefield….
To be continued tomorrow
