*The NEC should be the crucible where the Renewed Hope Agenda is broken down into state-level deliverables, where peer review becomes a badge of honour, and where best practices are codified and scaled. Instead, its seeming inertia allows fragmented, sometimes contradictory, economic development to persist.*
Nigeria stands at a crossroads of immense promise and profound peril. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda has ignited a national conversation about remaking our economy, dismantling the shackles of poverty, and building a nation that truly works for all. Yet, a creeping, dangerous assumption has taken root—that the work of transformation belongs to the President alone. We at the Transformative Governance Forum reject this passivity. The fight for Nigeria’s economic rebirth is too heavy for one man’s shoulders, however bold the vision. It demands that every institution, every leader, and every citizen become a co-architect of change. Nowhere is this collective duty more urgent—and more alarmingly underutilised—than in the National Economic Council.
*The Council That Was Built for This Moment*
The National Economic Council is not a ceremonial appendage of government. It is a constitutional heavyweight deliberately designed to fuse national purpose with subnational action. Section 153(1) of the 1999 Constitution, read with the Third Schedule, establishes the NEC and explicitly mandates it to *“advise the President concerning the economic affairs of the Federation, and in particular on measures necessary for the coordination of the economic planning efforts and economic programmes of the various Governments of the Federation.”*
Chaired by the Vice President, its members include all 36 state governors, the Governor of the Central Bank, and other key economic actors. In plain language,
> *The NEC is the constitutionally ordained roundtable where the federal government and the states are meant to align their fiscal, investment, and development strategies into a single harmonious symphony. It is the ideal engine to power the Renewed Hope Agenda beyond Abuja and into every ward, local government, and state capital.*
Why then is this formidable institution operating with the quietness of a whisper when Nigeria needs the roar of coordinated, transformative action? The NEC’s current rhythm feels episodic, often reduced to receiving reports and issuing polite communiqués that gather dust. Governors, many of whom champion legitimate visions for their states, too often pursue uncoordinated borrowings, disjointed agricultural policies, and parallel infrastructure projects that ignore national industrial and energy blueprints. The result is a federation pulling in multiple directions at once—a luxury our fragile economy can no longer afford.
*HE Shettima, Let the NEC Roar*
The person at the centre of this institutional slumber is our dear Vice President, *His Excellency Kashim Mustapha Shettima, GCON.* Let us be clear: this is not a critique of his person but a brutally advisory call to awaken the lion within his office.
> *HE Shettima possesses the intellect, the political capital, and the constitutional mandate to be the chief harmoniser of Nigeria’s economic governance.*
We see you, Your Excellency. We acknowledge the earnestness you bring to the table. Your eloquence, your intellectual sweep, the reassuring calm you project—these are not in doubt. And we understand the instinct that likely keeps you up at night: the honourable, almost touching desire to be the perfect number two.
You do not want to rock the boat. You do not want a single headline to whisper that the Vice President is building a parallel power base. You have gone out of your way to be seen as the loyal, dependable deputy, never overshadowing the President, never summoning a governor with a tone that might be mistaken for ambition. This restraint is, in its own way, admirable. But forgive us for saying this with the frankness of a concerned friend:
> *Your Excellency, you have overcorrected. You have become so careful not to appear a political rival that you have, perhaps unwittingly, dimmed the very constitutional torch you were handed. The nation did not ask you to vanish into deference; it asked you to lead a council into the storm and emerge with results.*
Here is the beautiful logic you seem to have forgotten, and it is the most persuasive argument for you to step fully into the arena: the Vice President is, *by constitutional design, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy in everything but the title.* Think about it carefully. The Minister of Finance, however connected, brilliant and hardworking, is a federal official. He can balance the federal budget, manage debt, and design fiscal policy for Abuja, *but he cannot summon a governor to account. And he cannot convene the 36 sovereign subnational economies around a single table and extract binding commitments. Only you can.*
The Constitution did not accidentally hand the chairmanship of the National Economic Council to the Vice President while leaving the Finance Minister on the members’ list. It did so because true economic coordination in a federation requires a figure with the political weight to convene governors as peers, not as a federal minister lecturing them from the capital.
The Minister of Finance manages the federal treasury; you are meant to manage the economic unity of the Nigerian federation. That is the role of a Coordinating Minister for the Economy—and the Constitution has already vested it in your office. You do not need a new title to claim it; you simply need to inhabit the one you already have with the audacity it deserves.
Your current posture, however, suggests you have outsourced the intellectual and coordinating leadership of the economy to the Ministry of Finance, as if your own constitutional platform were merely advisory. With the utmost respect, this is not humility; it is a misreading of the architecture. When the Minister of Finance stands alone to explain national economic policy without the NEC visibly forging the subnational alignment behind her, the presidency is deprived of its most potent weapon: the visible, unified march of the federation. *Imagine instead a Vice President who, after every NEC meeting, stands before the nation not just with a communiqué but with a dashboard of state-by-state commitments to the Renewed Hope Agenda, having brokered those commitments personally in the council.*
> *That would not make you a rival to the President; it would make you the fulfilment of his governance promise. The Minister of Finance can deliver a budget speech; only you can deliver a truly coordinated national economy.*
The Vice President must therefore become up and doing in a manner that leaves no governor in doubt that business-as-usual is over. We say this with a heavy dose of affection, but you must stop tiptoeing around the egos of governors as if robust coordination were a coup plot. You can hold a governor accountable for refusing to pay counterpart funding for basic education without anyone seriously believing you wish to usurp the President. You can tell a governor, publicly and lovingly, that his state’s reckless borrowing is sabotaging national fiscal stability without being branded as overambitious. The unfortunate situation is that you have internalized the caricature of an ambitious Vice President so deeply that you have opted for an almost saintly passivity. But there is no virtue in a quiet NEC while the economy groans.
Your aides right now are likely curating a bubble of reassurance around you—telling you that you are doing enough, that the President is happy, that the governors appreciate your gentle approach. You must be critical of those aides. Shatter that bubble. Demand that they bring you not comfort but courageous options. If your handlers see their primary job as shielding you from political risk, they are doing you—and Nigeria—a monumental disservice.
This level of courageous coordination requires innovation, and you, HE Shettima, are too gifted to settle for procedure. The NEC must become a laboratory of creative federalism under your chairmanship.
> Why can’t the NEC institute a quarterly Transformative Scorecard that benchmarks every state not just on internally generated revenue but on progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, ease of doing business, and alignment with the National Development Plan?
> Why can’t NEC meetings be partially open, streaming live, so that citizens become the ultimate accountability partners and, frankly, so that governors feel the healthy heat of public expectation?
> Why aren’t NEC committees turned into rapid-response task forces that unblock bottlenecks stifling private investment across multiple states?
Your office should be teeming with technical advisors who are not just political loyalists but disruptive thinkers—master practitioners of innovation, data analytics, and behavioural economics. With all due respect, you need aides who are less interested in protecting your political flanks and more obsessed with helping you function as the true coordinating minister for Nigeria’s economic destiny.
So here is our pleading, patronising as it may sound: come out of the shadow, Your Excellency. The President has set a bold course with tough but necessary reforms. If those reforms are to translate from policy pronouncements into tangible relief and prosperity, *the states must run with them, not walk. You are the only person with the constitutional and relational capital to make that happen.* We understand the tightrope you walk—balancing loyalty with leadership. But loyalty to a President does not mean silencing the constitutional coordinating body you chair; it means making that body the most effective instrument of the President’s own agenda.
Our message to every governor, minister, and public servant remains unchanged: we cannot leave the challenges to PBAT alone. The task is for us all equally. The President’s vision for a $1 trillion economy, for a nation that feeds itself, powers its industries, and educates its children, cannot be accomplished from the seat of Aso Rock alone. It requires each state to become a laboratory of transformative governance—innovating in land administration, basic education, primary healthcare, and digital infrastructure.
The NEC is the only constitutional table where that shared mission can be orchestrated. Let us not squander it because one good man is too afraid to be called ambitious, or because he has mistakenly ceded his coordinating mandate to a ministry that, however excellent, lacks the constitutional reach to unite a federation.
The Transformative Governance Forum believes profoundly in the Nigerian project. We believe that a new generation of leadership, acting with intentionality and collegial urgency, can turn our enormous potential into shared prosperity. But belief must be backed by institutional muscle. Let the National Economic Council rise. Let the Vice President lead the charge—not as a rival to the President, but as his greatest governance ally and the true coordinating minister of our collective economic renaissance. Let no one hide behind the false comfort that “Mr. President will sort it out.” He will not—not because he is incapable, but because he was never meant to do it alone. Senator Shettima, the moment to roar is not tomorrow. It is now.
Issued by the Transformative Governance Forum
www.tgf.org.ng
