FG’s Many Policy Experiments 

The Federal Government has once again been forced to retreat on one of its own economic policies. On Monday, September 15, 2025, Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, announced the suspension of the four per cent Free on Board levy on imported goods, a measure introduced by the Nigeria Customs Service earlier this year.

The levy, calculated on the value of imports, had immediately drawn outrage from traders, shipping companies, and manufacturers, who warned it would inflate prices, worsen inflation, and weaken Nigeria’s competitiveness in regional and global trade.

Edun, acting as Chairman of the Customs Service Board, instructed Comptroller-General Bashir Adewale Adeniyi to halt the plan after what his ministry described as “extensive consultations.” The official explanation was that stakeholders had convinced the government that the levy, in its current form, would do more harm than good. 

This is hardly an isolated episode. In May 2024, Nigerians woke up to a new Central Bank directive compelling banks, mobile money operators, and payment service providers to deduct a 0.5 per cent cybersecurity levy on every electronic transfer. For ordinary citizens, this meant that a transfer of one million naira would attract an additional charge of five thousand naira, on top of the existing array of bank fees. Public outrage was swift and fierce, and within days, President Bola Tinubu was forced to suspend the policy after a heated Federal Executive Council meeting.

Barely months later, another storm erupted when the government announced that 40 per cent of the internally generated revenue of federal universities would be automatically swept into the Treasury Single Account. The backlash from academics and students was immediate, with warnings that such a policy would cripple institutions already gasping for funds. Again, the administration quietly suspended the measure.

Even routine personnel decisions have not been immune to this pattern of reversal. When Tinubu reshuffled top executives at the Nigerian Television Authority, appointing new directors and a new managing director of NTA Enterprises, the move seemed decisive. Yet, within days, some of those appointments were withdrawn, with recalled appointees restored to their posts. The impression left was of a government that acts first and thinks later, treating governance like a revolving door of experiments.

Each suspension and reversal might be defended as responsiveness to public opinion, but taken together they point to something more troubling: a lack of rigour in policymaking at the very top. Rather than strengthening investor confidence, these repeated U-turns create uncertainty, leaving businesses, universities, and ordinary Nigerians unsure of which government policy will survive the week. What is pitched as reform often ends in retreat, with little to show for the disruption in confidence and the confusion it generates.

The suspended Customs levy is only the latest example of this contradiction. Importers may have breathed a sigh of relief, but without a coherent revenue strategy grounded in thorough consultation, the administration will keep lurching from one failed policy to another. For a government that came to power promising tough decisions and economic renewal, the recurring cycle of announcement, backlash, and suspension has become an indictment: evidence that it is not thinking its decisions through before unleashing them on a weary economy.