TINUBU NEW MEDIA STORMS CITY GATE ABUJA TO SPEAK TO NIGERIANS ON THE 66YRS ANNIVERSARY OF OUR BELOVETH NATION
CITY GATE ABUJA NIGERIANS CELEBRATES NIGERIA AT 66.
10/1/20264 min read
At City Gate, Abuja, on the morning Nigeria turned 66, the green-white-green still caught the light the way it did on 1 October 1960. Traffic slowed. Flags moved in the harmattan breeze. And a crowd of Nigerians — traders, students, civil servants, a few foreign correspondents with notebooks already open — pressed in around
Hon. Abiodun Bolade, known to many as AbbeyGovernor, Co-Convener of Tinubu New Media under the leadership of Dr Sunday Dare CON, Presidential Spokesperson to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who had come to take questions in the open air
He did not begin with statistics. He began with the speech the country had just heard.
PRESIDENT TINUBU SPEECH TODAY
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Independence Day address, titled “From Reform to Prosperity, had landed with the weight of a man who had chosen not to pretend. Sixty-six years after the flag was first raised over a free nation, the President told Nigerians that the journey had been harder, for longer, than it should have been. By 2023, he said, poverty was rising and hope was nearly gone.
The economy was sick. Distortions that successive governments had postponed had become structural. “We had no choice but to act.”
That honesty is what the crowd at City Gate kept returning to.
A woman from Nyanya asked the question everyone was thinking: why did the medicine have to hurt so much? Bolade did not dodge it. The President, he said, had acknowledged the present pain of ordinary Nigerians — the higher cost of living, the strain on households, the months when reform felt like punishment. Those sacrifices, Tinubu had argued, were not the destination. They were the price of refusing to hand a crumbling economy to the next generation.
THE PROMISE LAND
“The Promised Land before us,” the President said, “is a Nigeria of abundance and opportunity; a nation where prosperity is broadly shared, where every child can dream beyond the circumstances of his birth.”
The reforms did not invent Nigeria’s weaknesses. They confronted them. Fuel subsidy and a broken foreign-exchange regime had drained the treasury and rewarded a few. Oil theft had hollowed production. By the time the administration took office, postponement was no longer an option. Three and a half years later, the address declared a turning point:
THE EMERGENCY TREATMENT
“The emergency treatment is over. The foundation has been repaired. The central economic task before us has changed. For three years, our overriding purpose was to correct our nation’s course. Now, our purpose is simple: shared and widespread prosperity.”
The numbers the President placed on the table were the ones Bolade walked the foreign press through, slowly, so they could not be waved away as rhetoric. The economy, he said, has grown by over 4 per cent this year, with both oil and non-oil sectors contributing.
MACROECONOMICS FIXED
That figure sits close to the International Monetary Fund’s reading: growth estimated at about 4 per cent in 2025 and projected around 4.1 per cent in 2026, after reforms that the Fund itself has credited with strengthening macroeconomic stability and resilience. Oil theft is down, Inflation has fallen substantially from its peak. Foreign reserves have been rebuilt. The foreign-exchange market has stabilised. In 2025, non-oil export revenue exceeded $6 billion — the highest in the country’s history, real earnings by real Nigerian businesses. Foreign direct investment, the President noted, continues to rise.
MICROECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
None of that erases the hardship still felt in markets and kitchens. The IMF has also recorded that poverty and food insecurity remain severe for many households. Bolade said as much when a correspondent from a European wire pressed him. Macroeconomic repair is not the same as a full table. The administration’s claim is narrower, and more serious: the patient is no longer on emergency life support, and the work now is to turn stability into jobs, production and living standards that families can feel.
NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENCE
On security, the questions were sharper. Bolade pointed to the partnership with the United States that has deepened around counter-terrorism, intelligence sharing, Special Forces training, border surveillance and support against improvised explosive devices. Only days before the anniversary, Nigeria’s Minister of Defence, General Christopher Musa, received Major General Matthew Brown of the U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa, in Abuja to review joint operations, including work around the Lake Chad Basin. The United States has also backed Nigeria’s planned acquisition of attack helicopters as part of a wider defence relationship. Joint efforts have included coordinated operations against Islamic State-linked networks. Insecurity has not vanished — no honest account would say it has — but the military relationship is tighter, more operational, and aimed at the groups that have terrorised communities for years.
RENEWED HOPE EDUCATION
A student from the University of Abuja asked what 66 years should mean if so much of that time was disappointment. Bolade answered with the line that closed the morning for many in the crowd. Independence, the President had reminded the nation, was never only a flag and an anthem. It was a promise that Nigerians would shape their own destiny. Over 1.2million Nigerians have benefited from NELFUND STUDENT LOAN across the length and breathe of Nigeria. The reforms were the difficult correction of a course that had been allowed to drift. The prosperity now being declared is the work still ahead: shared, widespread, and meant for children who should not inherit the distortions their parents were forced to confront.
NIGERIANS WERE SHOCKED BY BOLADE’S PRESENTATION ABOUT PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU ACHIEVEMENTS
At City Gate the flags kept moving. The questions did not stop. But the story Nigeria was telling itself on its 66th birthday was no longer only a story of survival. It was a story of a hard repair, openly admitted pain, and a direction the President asked the country not to abandon: forward, with the foundation reset, toward a prosperity that has to reach the street if it is to mean anything at all.