The role of the coordinating minister for the economy (CME) is roughly equivalent to that of the caretaker of a family compound.
It is a compound where every man has built a fence, runs a generator, dug a borehole, and hired a gateman.
Now he is expected to make them draw from the same water tank and share the electricity bill, without anyone threatening to relocate.
The appointment of Taiwo Oyedele to replace Wale Edun as the 24th distinct substantive minister of finance since independence and the 4th coordinating minister for the economy since independence is a larger event than most ministerial reshuffles, because this one involves a man whose specific ideas about Nigeria’s revenue problem have spent two years making powerful people uncomfortable.
In Nigeria’s fiscal conversation, that is usually a sign that something real is being attempted. Every time Nigeria appoints a new finance minister, the same ritual plays out. Economists file optimistic commentary.
The Naira briefly firms on the parallel market, the way a patient sits up straighter when the doctor walks in, before settling back to whatever position the fundamentals dictate. Business associations issue statements about their confidence in the new direction.
And somewhere in Alaba International Market, a trader who has been reading exchange rates the way a farmer reads the harmattan simply adjusts her dress and gets on with the day.
The Role and What It Actually DemandsÂ
The title coordinating minister for the economy sounds, at first encounter, like something a committee invented to avoid giving anyone too much power without appearing to give anyone too little. The reality is considerably more demanding.
The role, which Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala shaped into its modern form under President Goodluck Jonathan, is designed to address a failure that runs through Nigerian economic governance like a fault line: line ministries operating as independent kingdoms, each pursuing its own sectoral interest with minimal reference to the macroeconomic framework they share.
For instance, if the agriculture minister is expanding a fertiliser subsidy at the same time the finance ministry is tightening the budget, and the trade minister is adjusting import duties on competing goods, and nobody is resolving the contradiction, the result is the circular policy incoherence Nigeria has elevated to something close to a governing tradition.
The coordinating minister is supposed to be in the room running it, and credible enough to ensure the decisions taken there actually stick. It is the most consequential economic appointment in the cabinet, and historically the most thankless.
Wale Edun’s ScorecardÂ
Wale Edun arrived in May 2023 as the executor of a reform agenda whose most dramatic decisions had already been made for him. The petrol subsidy was gone before the ministries were fully staffed.
The exchange rate had been unified in a single announcement that sent the Naira into a decline that turned out to be somewhat less orderly than intended. His assignment was to manage the aftermath while keeping the fiscal accounts from coming apart. He managed, mostly.
The subsidy that had consumed over four trillion Naira annually by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company’s own disclosures was no longer consuming it. The multiple exchange rate windows that had functioned as a private wealth transfer mechanism for those with access to official allocations were closed.
Nigeria’s revenue profile, historically among the most anaemic in Africa at around nine per cent of GDP by IMF estimates, began showing real movement as the non-oil revenue drive produced numbers that were not purely aspirational.
The other side of the ledger is harder to read around. Inflation climbed above 34 per cent by late 2023, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, a level that imposed a relentless tax on every Naira held by anyone who could not protect their savings in a harder currency.
The Naira lost more than half its official value in the first year. The pain was distributed with a consistency that would embarrass a redistribution economist: it fell most heavily on the households least capable of absorbing it.
The criticism of Edun was never really about the direction of travel. The unification and the subsidy removal were overdue. It was about the absence of anything resembling a cushion for the Nigerians who had to make the journey on foot.
What Taiwo Oyedele Is Expected to Do DifferentlyÂ
Taiwo Oyedele enters with a different kind of credibility. As chairman of the Presidential Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms Committee, he spent nearly two years doing something Nigerian technocrats rarely manage successfully: producing concrete, detailed legislation aimed at fixing something structural rather than managing something cyclical.
The bills his committee produced proposed to rationalise over sixty taxes and levies scattered across three tiers of government into a coherent revenue system, to raise the tax-to-GDP ratio from the current ten percent reported by the Federal Inland Revenue
Service toward a level capable of funding a government with real service ambitions, and to redistribute value-added tax in ways that shift more resources toward consumption states and away from the formula that has historically rewarded proximity to Abuja over productive economic activity.
The controversy these proposals generated is the most encouraging thing about them. Governors complained about the VAT redistribution. Northern leaders raised concerns about where the consumption tax burden lands geographically. The Senate found multiple provisions to object to. In Nigeria, fiscal reform that upsets nobody has changed nothing.
As the Yoruba proverb holds, the masquerade that dances too long will eventually be unmasked. Nigeria’s revenue architecture has been performing its underfunded routine for three decades, and the unmasking is no longer optional.
What Oyedele is expected to do differently from his predecessor is not simply to produce better headline numbers, though the numbers matter. It is to close the gap between design and implementation that has been the graveyard of Nigerian economic reform across administrations.
Edun managed a reform shock that arrived pre-packaged. Oyedele must now move his own bills through the legislature, negotiate the federation account arithmetic with thirty-six governors who have their own revenue calculations, and then implement the result through a tax administration that has its own institutional gravity.
That distance, from a well-written reform paper to a functioning revenue system, is the distance that determines whether a minister is remembered or forgotten.
The Benchmark of an Excellent MinisterÂ
The standard against which an excellent coordinating minister should be judged is not a quarterly GDP figure or a warm IMF Article IV consultation in the form of a favourable IMF statement, though Nigerians have learned to accept these as proxies when more direct evidence, which has become increasingly scarce, is scarce.
The genuine benchmark is more demanding. It is the structural condition of the economy at the end of the tenure. Is the revenue base demonstrably broader at the end of the tenure than at the start? Has the exchange rate been managed on market principles, without the administrative distortions that have repeatedly destroyed investor confidence and generated the parallel markets that every reform claims to abolish?
Has the debt service ratio moved away from the ninety-plus per cent of revenue that the IMF identified as among the most strained fiscal positions globally? Has inflation come within a range that allows businesses to plan beyond the next quarter?
Very importantly, because macroeconomic gains mean little to the common man, how do the gains of reforms trickle down quickly to the common man? And have sector ministries actually been coordinated around a shared macroeconomic direction, or merely summoned to the same cabinet meetings?
Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter. Finance ministers who succeed in Nigeria rarely receive credit in real time; those who stumble rarely absorb the full weight of the structural problems they inherited.
Oyedele steps into a role where the diagnosis and the instruments to address it are, for once, in the same hands, just as the proverbial yam and knife. Whether the political will to push his tax architecture through the National Assembly, past the federation account anxieties of thirty-six governors and the revenue instincts of a Senate that treats sharing formulas as its primary constituency interest, holds long enough to produce durable change is the question that no amount of technical competence alone can answer.
He has spent two years designing the tools. The country is watching to see if he has the political stamina to use them and the institutional resilience to make the results outlast his tenure.
Akinola Morakinyo (Ph. D) writes on MINT economies from the Department of Economics, Finance & Quantitative Analysis, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA.Â
