By Austin Chukwudi
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
The proverb, often misattributed to ancient Greece, is about sacrifice for a future one will not see. In Nigeria today, President Bola Tinubu’s administration seems to says that is exactly what its painful economic reforms are asking Nigerians to do.
Since May 2023, the government has removed fuel subsidies, unified the foreign exchange market, overhauled the tax system, and signed new laws on electricity and national identity.
Officials argue the policies mirror the tree planter in the proverb: costly now, with no immediate comfort for the person doing the planting, but intended to provide shade for generations to come.
“Think about a road, a hospital, a school,” a senior government official said this week. “Somebody made a decision at some point to begin something they knew they would never see finished. That is what these reforms are.”
The subsidy removal alone ended an annual expenditure of about ₦4.3 trillion. The government estimates savings of between ₦4 trillion and ₦6 trillion per year, funds it says are now going into reserves and capital projects.
Forex unification ended a system where the same dollar sold for ₦400 through official channels and ₦800 on the street. Tax reforms collapsed more than 60 levies into fewer than 10, and exempted individuals earning ₦800,000 or less annually from personal income tax.
The cost has been immediate. Inflation peaked at 34.8 per cent in December 2024. Households have faced higher transport and food costs. That is the “no return, no acknowledgement” part of the proverb: a sacrifice made without personal benefit in sight.
The administration points to early data as evidence the tree is taking root.
Foreign reserves have risen from $33 billion in May 2023 to $50 billion, the highest in 13 years. Foreign investment inflows increased from $90 million to $720 million in one quarter. The stock market has gained 136 per cent since May 2023, and inflation has eased to 15 per cent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
The new Electricity Act for the first time in 60 years allows states to generate and sell their own power, ending a centralised monopoly. The NIMC Act 2026 modernised the national identity database, which officials credit with identifying security threats.
“If such funds are properly used and accounted for, they could transform public health and education,” said opposition figure Peter Obi this week, while criticising the process. The government’s argument is that without the reforms, there would be no funds to transform anything.
The proverb’s difficulty is that most human motivation runs on return. People work for wages. Governments spend for votes.
Nigeria’s reforms ask citizens to pay more today for benefits that may arrive after the current administration leaves office. They ask a society to expand its concern “beyond the self, beyond people currently alive, into a future that is entirely abstract,” as the proverb describes.
The inverse, officials warn, is also true. “A society in which people plant only what they will personally harvest begins to shrink,” one policy document stated. “Gradually, the shade disappears, because nobody was willing to plant for someone else’s afternoon.”
Like the Talmudic story of the old man planting a carob tree – “Just as my fathers planted for me, I plant for my sons” the government perhaps frames the reforms as intergenerational.
Whether Nigerians accept that framing will determine the legacy. The reforms do not demand belief. They simply name what the administration says greatness requires: the willingness to do something whose full reward belongs entirely to someone else.
To plant the tree. To not wait for the shade.
The Presidency said the reforms remain irreversible and that their full impact will be measured over decades, not quarters.