*2027 ELECTIONS: ECONOMY, SECURITY AND NIGERIA’S FUTURE
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.
Protocols.
1. Let me begin with the Chairman of this occasion, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, who spent nearly eight years as this country’s chief communicator and who knows better than anyone in this hall how narrow, and how important, the ground between government and the press can be.
2. To the Special Guest of Honour, Senator Gbenga Daniel, who 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 arrives at one table and the table is never large enough.
3. To the Chief Host, Mr. Eze Anaba, President of the Nigerian Guild of Editors and Editor of Vanguard. And to our host, Mr. Gabriel Akinadewo, and the management and staff of Swaaya Limited, publishers of Freedom Online: thank you for the invitation, and for the confidence it represents.
4. I did my homework 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.
5. 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.
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 has stood before the electorate twice and been trusted twice, and who now leads his party into the 2027 elections in Lagos State.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, let me begin with the number that should frame everything else we say today. That number is twenty-eight.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. So let me address the subsidy directly, because Nigerians deserve better than slogans on either side of it.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. 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.
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 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.
25. 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.
26. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, security will shape 2027 in two ways, and we should be clear-eyed about both.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. 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.
30. 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.
31. Then there is State Policing. When it is completed, it will rank among the most consequential reforms in the history of this country, and I want to say something about it from experience rather than theory.
32. Lagos has been running a version of it for almost twenty years. The Lagos State Security Trust Fund, created in 2007, pools contributions from the private sector and the State to equip the police and the other agencies that keep this city safe. Our Neighborhood Safety Corps puts men and women from every community on the ground in that community.
33. The lesson of two decades is not complicated. Security works best when the people who pay for it and the people who depend on it can see, and hold to account, the people who provide it. That is the whole argument for State Policing in a single sentence.
34. The President understands this because he governed this State. His conviction about devolving power to the grassroots is the same conviction behind his fight for full financial autonomy for local governments, which the Supreme Court affirmed in July 2024. State Policing will require amendments to the Constitution, which means the National Assembly and our State Houses of Assembly. Whoever sits in the next Assembly, I hope they will finish the job.
35. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen
36. We speak of the economy and security as though they were two subjects. They are one. Poverty feeds insecurity, and insecurity strangles the very economy that would cure poverty. When a farmer cannot go to his farm, the nation gets hungrier. When a school is not safe, the country gets another cohort of children who never learned to read. And the reverse is just as true. The most effective security policy is a job, and the surest guarantee of a job is a country safe enough to invest in.
37. Lagos is the proof. Every business that opens in this city is a vote of confidence in the safety of this city. We did not attract the Lekki Deep Sea Port, or build the blue and red rail lines, or draw the investment that has made Lagos the technology capital of Africa, by accident. We did it because, first, people had to believe that Lagos was safe enough to bet on. That is the nexus. I have not read about it. I have lived it for seven years.
38. It is why the President’s interventions have gone straight at the poverty that feeds insecurity, and straight at the demographic with the most to gain or to lose: our young people. Nigeria has one of the largest youth populations on earth. That is either the greatest dividend in our history or the greatest danger to it, depending entirely on what we do in the next ten years.
39. The Nigerian Education Loan Fund is keeping students in school who would otherwise have dropped out. The Consumer Credit Corporation is building the credit culture without which no modern economy functions. The 3 Million Technical Talent program is training the workforce of a digital economy. The recently unveiled reform of the National Youth Service Corps is turning a year of service into a year of enterprise.
40. And behind these stand the Nigerian Youth Academy, the Nigeria Health Fellowship, the Student Venture Capital Grant, the Power Force program and the Labor Employment and Empowerment Program. It is hard to name an administration that has invested in young Nigerians on this scale.
41. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, we can argue about the economy and about security from now until January. None of it will matter if the election itself is not credible. So let me turn to the referee.
42. Our elections have improved. Anyone who covered the elections of the 2000s, as many in this hall did, knows how far we have come, and much of that distance was travelled on this party’s watch: the Electoral Act of 2022 and now the Electoral Act of 2026, and the technology that verifies voters and transmits results. But this is not the moment to rest on our oars. INEC must be ready in every polling unit on the 16th of January and again on the 6th of February, and each of us has a duty to help it be ready.
43. I want to say something about the President and this process, and I want to say it with a recent example, because an example is worth more than an assurance.
44. Nineteen days ago, on the 15th of August, the people of Osun State elected a governor. The candidate of my party, the President’s party, lost. The incumbent, Governor Ademola Adeleke, of a different party, won by more than sixty thousand votes. The President did not sulk and he did not equivocate. He picked up the telephone the following day, congratulated the winner, urged him to unite the State, and thanked INEC and the security agencies for a peaceful and transparent election. Governor Adeleke has since publicly thanked the President for ensuring a level playing field.
45. Think about what that means. There was a time in this country when “federal might” was a phrase that a ruling party used without irony. Under this President, the ruling party can lose a state, in the South-West, in an election year, and the sky does not fall. That is what a maturing democracy looks like. This President is a lifelong democrat, and he means to leave behind a stronger democracy than he inherited, not only for Nigerians but as an example to a continent that badly needs one.
46. And let me add one sentence for every candidate and every party, my own included. A mandate is only as strong as the process that produced it. No office in this land is worth the life of a single Nigerian, and no victory won by the wrong means is a victory at all.
47. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, you cannot discuss 2027 and leave out the 36 governors. Nigeria is not one economy but thirty-seven: 36 States and the Federal Capital Territory. The people who manage those economies will decide much of the outcome of this election, whether they mean to or not.
48. Voters may not be economists, but they are excellent accountants. They know whether their State built the road it promised. They know whether the primary health center has a nurse in it. They will bring that ledger with them to the polling unit.
49. Let me be candid with my colleagues, because I have sat where they sit for seven years. Under this President, the States have had it very good. Since the subsidy was removed, the monthly allocations to States and local governments have more than doubled in naira terms. The President has done his part; the money is arriving. What is done with it is on us. The excuses have been removed, and the electorate knows it.
50. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, no discussion of our future is complete without the world beyond our borders, and here I want to be careful, because the temptation in an election year is to pretend that everything that happens to Nigeria is decided in Nigeria.
51. It is not. Oil prices, the wars in Europe and the Middle East, the interest-rate decisions of the world’s major central banks: these move our economy, for good and for ill, and no President controls them. What a government controls is how it responds, and the test of any response is whether it protects people’s livelihoods, businesses and industries while the shock passes through. I believe this government has passed that test more often than not, and I believe the reserves and the naira are the evidence.
52. The same is true of security. Our neighbors’ wars do not stay on their side of the border, and our borders are long. We must keep our eyes on the region and keep improving our early-warning and response systems. The President’s recent decision to set up a high-level panel to produce a National Threat Assessment and a Five-Year Strategic Defence Operations Plan is exactly the kind of planning a serious country does.
53. This is also where the President’s foreign policy has quietly delivered. It has had two objectives: bring investment in, and bring security partners in. On investment, the verdict of the market is in. The Nigerian stock market has been one of the best-performing in the world this year, and the value of the companies listed on it has grown more than five-fold since 2023.
54. On security, we now have partners who are not merely sympathetic but present. In July, President Trump wrote to President Tinubu to say that it was, in his words, “a true honor to stand with you in the fight against terrorists.” Behind that sentence stand a Defense Cooperation Roadmap, a joint working group led by the national security advisers of both countries, and joint operations that have already produced results.
55. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, I want to end where the theme ends: with the future.
56. There is a future beyond 2027, and it is a bright one. The President has set the destination: a one-trillion-dollar economy by 2030. I know there are people who scoff at that number. People also scoffed at reserves of fifty billion dollars, and at a billion dollars a month in remittances, and at a stock market worth more than 150 trillion naira. Set the target, do the work, and let the scoffers keep the score.
57. We have moved past the era when every election felt like the one that might end the Republic. When the 2027 elections are done, 2031 will come, and then 2035, and 2039. That confidence, which our parents never had, is itself an achievement of this democracy, and we should say so.
58. I will not disguise my hope for the outcome. I expect my party to win, and I expect a second term for President Tinubu to consolidate the Renewed Hope agenda, because an unfinished reform is the most expensive kind. But whatever the outcome, I expect the election to be peaceful, I expect the loser to concede, and I expect Nigeria to add one more milestone to its record.
59. And now, the harder request I promised you at the beginning. It is for you. The fourth estate holds immense power in an election season, and power carries obligation. To whom much is given, much is expected.
60. I am not asking for a compliant press. A compliant press is of no use to a democracy; it flatters the powerful and abandons the public. I am asking for a rigorous press. Check the facts, mine included. Call out disinformation wherever it comes from, including from my own side. In the weeks ahead, the most dangerous lies will not come from newspapers. They will come from anonymous accounts and doctored videos, and you are the institution best placed to answer them.
61. I am asking you to look where others do not. Our deputy governorship candidate in Lagos is a woman, extending a tradition in which women have held that office four times out of seven since 1999, including an unbroken run from 2007 to 2019. Women remain badly under-represented in our politics; cover the women who are running. Young people are trying to break in; cover them too.
62. And I am asking you to tell the whole story. I am not asking you to hide this country’s problems. I am asking you to give the same energy to what is working: the business that opened, the student who got the loan, the town whose road finally arrived. There is a place for patriotism in journalism. Patriotism is not propaganda; it is the refusal to let those who wish this country ill have the last word about it.
63. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, one hundred and thirty-five days from now, Nigerians will do something no generation before ours ever did: elect a President, peacefully and on schedule, for the eighth time in succession.
64. Nigeria’s future will not be decided on the 16th of January. It will be decided by what we do with the mandate that the 16th of January produces: whether we finish the reforms or abandon them halfway; whether we complete State Policing or leave it on the drawing board; whether we turn our young people into a dividend or a grievance; whether we build the one-trillion-dollar economy or merely talk about it.
65. Our elders say that one hand cannot lift a load onto the head. The Federal Government has a part. The States have a part. INEC has a part. And you, the fourth estate, have a part that no one else can play.
66. Let us lift this load together, and let 2027 be remembered not as the election Nigeria survived, but as the election at which Nigeria came of age.
67. I thank you for your kind attention. God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu
Governor of Lagos State
September 3, 2026
