How Executive Orders fast-tracking Nigeria’s fiscal credibility

In less than three years, ten executive orders have reshaped Nigeria’s fiscal landscape, unlocked billions in investment, and begun restoring a credibility that took decades to squander. The results are uneven — but the direction is unmistakable.

On July 6, 2023, barely six weeks after his inauguration, President Bola Tinubu signed four executive orders before a single budget had been debated, a single committee convened, or a single opposition bloc mobilised. That sequencing was not accidental. It was a statement of method: where legislation would be slow, the executive pen would be fast.

The orders were modest in form — deferring a tax act, shifting excise dates, suspending green levies — but consequential in signal. For multinationals watching from London and Dubai, the signal was more important than the substance. A government that polices itself is a rarer thing in this part of the world than it should be.

Oil and gas inflection

By February 2024, the administration turned its executive order toolkit toward Nigeria’s structural Achilles heel: the petroleum sector. Three orders — numbered 40, 41, and 42 — targeted the industry’s chronic dysfunctions simultaneously. Executive Order 40 introduced targeted tax credits for non-associated gas greenfields, midstream operations, and deepwater projects, sectors that had languished for years under fiscal uncertainty. Order 41 directed the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board to stop weaponising local content requirements as a transaction tax on capital. Order 42 compressed the contracting approval cycle to six months and raised the threshold for bureaucratic sign-off to $10 million — a direct assault on the rent-seeking layered into procurement.

Healthcare’s quiet industrial policy

Perhaps the least-heralded order has produced some of the most concrete results. The June 2024 Tax Waiver on Pharmaceutical Inputs removed all import duties, tariffs, and VAT on machinery, equipment, and raw materials used in domestic pharmaceutical and medical device production. Within fourteen months, 87 local manufacturers were operating under the new regime, production costs had fallen 12%, and two Nigerian-made products had achieved WHO prequalification — a first for West and Central Africa. This is textbook import substitution: not through protectionist walls, but through targeted fiscal incentives that improve the domestic cost structure.

Closing the revenue leak: Order No. 9

The February 2026 Executive Order No. 9 may prove to be the most fiscally significant of the series. It terminated NNPC Limited’s entitlement to a 30% management fee on profit oil and profit gas revenues, and simultaneously abolished the 30% Frontier Exploration Fund deduction — two mechanisms that had been quietly diverting federation revenues for decades. All operators under production sharing contracts must now remit royalty oil, tax oil, profit oil, and profit gas directly to the Federation Account. Gas flare penalties, previously absorbed into the Midstream and Downstream Gas Infrastructure Fund, will follow the same route.

Investment verdict

Markets have noticed. In April 2025, Fitch upgraded Nigeria’s long-term foreign-currency issuer default rating from B- to B with a Stable outlook—the first such upgrade in years, explicitly citing the administration’s improved policy credibility and fiscal coherence. This validation followed the country’s highly successful re-entry into the Eurobond market in December 2024, where the government raised $2.2 billion against an order book that exceeded $9 billion. FPI has surged to record levels. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, FPI spiked by nearly 150 per cent year-on-year to $5.2 billion, accounting for over 90 per cent of total capital importation. While this “hot money” targets short-term domestic debt, it has provided crucial liquidity to stabilize the naira. FDI after languishing for years under the weight of currency controls and profit-repatriation fears, saw a massive 700 per cent quarter-on-quarter rebound to $720 million in Q3 2025. Diaspora remittances have surged moving toward a projected $26 billion annual run rate. Gross foreign exchange reserves surged past $50 billion by early March 2026. Real GDP growth accelerated to an estimated 4.1 per cent in 2025.

Limits of the instrument

None of this means the problems are solved, and it would be a disservice to pretend otherwise. There is also the structural fragility of executive orders as an instrument. They are fast, which is their advantage. But they are also reversible, inconsistently implemented, and untested in court in ways that statutory law is not. The bureaucracy that these orders are meant to bypass has a long institutional memory and a longer history of outlasting individual administrations. For now, though, Nigeria has something it has lacked for long enough that its absence had started to feel permanent: a government that appears to know which obstacles it is trying to remove, and is methodically removing them. That is not a small thing. In this market, in this decade, it might even be enough to keep the momentum going — provided the legislation, the institutions, and the courts can eventually catch up.

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• Durosawo, a financial systems practitioner, writes from Abuja