Tinubu was clear: Nigeria sees climate not as a constraint, but as a lever for growth. This is indeed a bold pivot, especially for a Petro-state.
Ads by Pubfuture
However, for much of his first two years in office, Tinubu’s climate policy was anything but certain. It was marked more by symbolism than strategy. At COP28 in Dubai, Nigeria drew criticism for fielding one of the world’s largest delegations—despite arriving without a negotiating agenda or concrete deliverables.
For some, it seemed less a diplomatic mission than a workaround to the UAE’s visa restrictions on Nigerians. A Special Presidential Envoy on Climate was appointed—despite lacking any climate expertise—while overlapping committees with unclear mandates jostled for power. The statutory National Climate Change Council has yet to meet since the Act was passed. The Presidential Committee on Climate Action hasn’t either. Climate, it seemed, was a lower-order priority.
The good news is that this appears to be changing. Since Nigeria’s diplomatic turn toward BRICS, high-level state visits to China and Brazil, and the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, climate has been reframed—less as a technocratic sacrifice in service of decarbonisation, and more as a rational economic and geopolitical choice. It is increasingly being positioned not as a concession to global norms, but as a platform for national transformation.
Framing climate action as a “strategic imperative,” he laid out policy positions signposting Nigeria’s development intentions. Unlike previous rhetoric-heavy efforts, he backs his rhetoric with real structural moves—from solarising the State House to reshaping fiscal federalism with greater revenue autonomy for states.
Yet, ambition alone is not enough. Nigeria’s Energy Transition Plan (ETP) may have arrived before South Africa’s—but unlike South Africa’s JETP, Nigeria has yet to unlock large-scale concessional finance. This is not for lack of effort, but because the ETP remains a statement of intent, not a delivery platform. It describes what must happen, but not how it will be financed, implemented, or coordinated.
Tinubu’s pivot, however, goes deeper. It marks a break from his predecessors—President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo—who, despite introducing frameworks like the Climate Change Act and ETP, approached climate policy as a tool for international fundraising or platform for economic nationalism.
Their efforts, while notable, lacked the political bite to enact foundational reforms: neither subsidy removal nor institutional reordering materialized before they left office.
Tinubu, by contrast, appears to understand what many still miss: that climate is not merely a moral cause or a global obligation. It is political economy—tied to fiscal reform, state legitimacy, and competitive advantage. His decision to remove the petrol subsidy and allow the naira to float, while not primarily climate-driven, required the political courage needed to restore macroeconomic stability. It succeeded where his predecessors fearful of political consequences, hesitated. His climate pitch is now grounded in the hard realities of state capacity, global shifts, and Nigeria’s developmental needs. It makes common, political and commercial sense.
At the heart of this approach is a growing recognition that what Nigeria—and indeed the Global South—needs is not another climate plan. It needs a country platform: not just a better implementation tool, but a different kind of institutional logic altogether. Unlike energy transition plans, which tend to focus primarily on mitigation, a country platform is inclusive by design. It integrates climate into a broader development agenda, greening the economy—connecting adaptation, industrial policy, fiscal reform, and institutional delivery into a single national platform for transformation.
Where ETPs substitute, platforms expand.
Tinubu appears to understand this distinction intuitively. In his Renewed Hope manifesto, he pledged to amplify Africa’s voice in a climate debate that too often penalizes those who polluted the least. And in a striking metaphor, he once likened Nigeria’s role in global climate negotiations to that of a ‘church rat’ asked to eat poisoned Holy Communion—an image that underscored the dangers of climate solutions that ignore the fiscal and structural realities of poor nations.
Today, that framing is evolving into strategy: climate not as burden, but as leverage—an entry point for rethinking development through sovereign agency, institutional reform, and South–South cooperation.
This is where Tinubu’s broader strategy becomes more interesting. He’s not just selling a plan—he’s building partnerships and institutions that can carry it. The upgrade to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with China and deeper agro-industrial collaboration with Brazil aren’t sideshows. They are components of a new geopolitical alignment where South-South cooperation is strategically grounded in national development needs for climate-compatible growth.
Tinubu’s fiscal reforms—especially those devolving more resources to subnational governments—signal a loosening of the centralised chokehold that has stifled state-level innovation. This creates space for policy entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and green capital to engage at the subnational level, where many of Nigeria’s most pressing energy and adaptation challenges live.
But these moves must be consolidated. Building a platform is not the same as running one. Execution will demand not only political will but consistent state capability across electoral cycles, agencies, and subnational actors. Without that, even the most ambitious agenda risks fading into irrelevance.
The Tinubu administration has placed a series of strategic bets—on subsidy reform, fiscal devolution, and geopolitical alignment—leveraging climate as a set of linked components in Nigeria’s platform for development. From fiscal decentralisation to carbon market reforms, from green partnerships with Brazil and China to political signals like State House solarisation, these bets form the early architecture of a climate-compatible development model, in a whole-of-government planning approach.
This is Nigeria’s moment to build such a platform: one that aligns presidential authority, regulatory reform, subnational innovation, and international climate financing. A platform that learns from Bangladesh’s “elite bargain for development,” as Stefan Dercon argues, where the political class chooses delivery over dysfunction.
If Tinubu’s climate pivot is real—and the early signals suggest it is—then Nigeria has a chance to shape the green transition. That will take more than speeches. It will take sustained, strategic risk—the kind of gamble that defines a presidency. It’s the same kind of calculated risk Tinubu took in Lagos—transforming a city once associated with urban chaos and institutional decay into a magnet for innovation.
Today, Lagos is home to the vast majority of Nigeria’s tech unicorns, and reportedly more than half of all $1 billion valuation fintech unicorns in Africa were incubated there—a testament to what deliberate, politically-backed institutional reform can achieve when aligned with private sector dynamism. Just as Lagos’ transformation was underpinned by infrastructure, rule changes, and executive commitment, Nigeria’s climate pivot now requires similar systems-level discipline—across ministries, markets, and federal tiers.
The moment for Tinubu to shape
Africa’s sustainable growth is now -if he stays the course- Nigeria maybe on the path to redefining what climate leadership from the Global South looks like—not by declarations, but by design and action.
Adeyanju Binuyo, (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), a tech-preneur, strategist, and expert in climate and sustainable development, writes in from Abuja.
