NGScorecard

Promised an all-out war on corruption, recovery of looted funds, and prosecution of those who stole public money.

High-profile EFCC prosecutions and asset recovery — including the Abacha loot repatriation deals — were notable. However, critics noted selective prosecution and continued immunity for political allies. OECD estimates roughly $1 billion was recovered during the term.

Declared Boko Haram technically defeated in 2015 shortly after taking office. Promised to rescue all Chibok girls and restore normalcy to the North-East.

Boko Haram lost significant territory and fractured into splinter groups. 107 of the 276 Chibok girls were rescued or freed. However, insurgency continued in a degraded form, and banditry expanded to the North-West. Full normalcy was not achieved.

Promised to invest in rail rehabilitation, fix major highways, and dramatically increase electricity supply.

Major rail projects completed: Lagos-Ibadan rail, Abuja-Kaduna line extended, Itakpe-Warri line. Road rehabilitation was uneven. Power generation capacity increased modestly but outages remained chronic; average grid output stayed below 5,000MW against a demand of 30,000MW+.

Pledged mass job creation through industrialisation, agriculture, and small business support.

Official unemployment rose from roughly 10% in 2015 to 33% by Q4 2020 (NBS methodology). Youth unemployment exceeded 42%. The N-Power programme enrolled about 500,000 graduates in temporary public work, falling far short of demand.

The APC's 2015 and 2019 manifestos pledged to review the constitution and devolve more powers, resources, and responsibilities to state and local governments — 'true federalism'.

No devolution bill was ever transmitted by the presidency. The 2015–2019 and 2019–2023 National Assemblies handled restructuring only through backbench constitution-amendment bills, most of which failed. Buhari personally showed little enthusiasm for the agenda, and state police, resource control, and fiscal federalism proposals all stalled under his watch.

Promised to consolidate the Presidential Amnesty Programme for ex-militants and address the environmental and developmental grievances driving Niger Delta militancy.

The Amnesty Programme continued with stipends for over 30,000 ex-agitators, and pipeline vandalism eased for stretches after the 2016 Niger Delta Avengers campaign. However, environmental remediation (Ogoni clean-up/HYPREP) moved slowly, and militancy resurged periodically whenever amnesty funding or stipends lapsed.

Pledged to end the escalating farmer-herder clashes across the Middle Belt through a national livestock policy that would not impose grazing land on unwilling states.

The government's RUGA settlement plan, announced in June 2019, triggered immediate backlash from southern and Middle Belt governors over perceived land appropriation for Fulani herders, and was suspended within days. No replacement livestock policy was implemented. Farmer-herder killings continued throughout the North-Central and Middle Belt, with thousands of deaths recorded by conflict trackers between 2015 and 2023.

Promised strict enforcement of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) across all federal ministries, departments and agencies to consolidate government cash and stop the diversion of public revenue into private commercial accounts.

The TSA, first introduced under Jonathan, was enforced government-wide from September 2015. Over 20,000 previously dormant MDA bank accounts were closed and consolidated at the CBN. The reform is widely credited as one of the more durable fiscal governance improvements of the Buhari years, though some agencies continued to find operational workarounds.

Pledged a National Social Investment Programme including a school feeding scheme, conditional cash transfers to the poorest households, N-Power job placements for graduates, and GEEP/TraderMoni micro-loans for traders and artisans.

The National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme reportedly fed over 9 million pupils at its peak before COVID-19 disrupted school attendance. Conditional cash transfers and N-Power reached millions of beneficiaries cumulatively, but implementation was dogged by weak targeting data, allegations of politicisation, and a 2020 audit that found significant gaps between claimed and verifiable beneficiary numbers.

Promised to end Nigeria's dependence on imported rice and other staples through the Anchor Borrowers' Programme, land border closures, and support for local farmers.

Rice production and milling capacity increased substantially, and the August 2019 land border closure temporarily curbed smuggling. However, the CBN's own review later found high default rates (over 50% in some assessments) on Anchor Borrowers loans, food inflation rose sharply after the border closure, and Nigeria remained a large net food importer at the end of the term.

Promised to fix the privatised power sector and dramatically raise generation and transmission capacity to meet national demand.

Installed generation capacity grew only marginally, and actual power delivered to the grid rarely exceeded 4,000–5,000MW throughout the two terms — far short of the 20,000MW target and of estimated national demand above 30,000MW. Multiple total grid collapses occurred every year, and metering gaps left millions of customers on estimated billing.

Promised to make the state oil company transparent and commercially run, ending decades of opacity around crude revenue and subsidy claims.

NNPC began publishing monthly financial and operational reports from 2019 — a first. The Petroleum Industry Act (2021) converted NNPC into a commercial entity, NNPC Limited, incorporated in 2021 and formally unveiled in 2022. However, the transition was not complete by the end of the term, and questions over unremitted revenue and subsidy under-recovery persisted throughout.

Promised to finally pass comprehensive petroleum sector legislation that had been stuck in the National Assembly since 2008 under successive administrations.

The Petroleum Industry Act was passed by the National Assembly in July 2021 and signed into law by Buhari on 16 August 2021 — the first comprehensive overhaul of Nigeria's oil and gas legal framework in over two decades. Host community provisions and fiscal terms were criticised by parts of the industry and civil society, but the two-decade legislative logjam was broken.

Promised electoral reforms to reduce rigging, violence, and delays, and to modernise INEC's processes.

Buhari declined to sign an earlier Electoral Act amendment in 2018, and the 2019 general election was marred by vote-buying and violence in several states. However, he signed the Electoral Act 2022, which mandated the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and electronic transmission of results — reforms first used in the 2023 general election, widely seen as the most significant electoral legal reform in over a decade despite continued implementation gaps.

Promised a leaner, less expensive government, cutting waste and the size of the political class.

The cost of running the presidency and the National Assembly rose over the two terms, and Buhari's cabinet and aide appointments were larger than promised on the campaign trail. Recurrent expenditure consistently outpaced capital expenditure in the federal budget throughout his tenure, and repeated pledges to cut the presidential fleet and convoy sizes were not delivered.

Promised a coordinated national response to the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020, including lockdowns, testing scale-up, and economic relief for vulnerable households.

The Presidential Task Force coordinated an initial lockdown and testing capacity expanded from a handful of labs to over 100. However, the October 2020 discovery of unused, hoarded COVID-19 palliatives in warehouses across several states — looted by the public amid #EndSARS unrest — became a defining symbol of distribution failure. Economic relief (N-CARES, cash transfers) reached a fraction of the informal-sector workers hit hardest by lockdowns.

Promised reforms to cut red tape and make Nigeria more attractive to investors, targeting a top-100 global ranking.

Through the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC), Nigeria climbed from 169th in 2015 to 131st in the World Bank's 2020 Ease of Doing Business ranking (the report's final edition before discontinuation), driven by reforms to business registration, construction permits, and cross-border trade. The top-100 target was not reached, but the sustained multi-year improvement was one of the more consistently delivered reforms of the era.

Promised to build a unified national identity database to improve security, financial inclusion, and service delivery.

The government mandated linkage of the National Identification Number (NIN) to all mobile SIM cards from December 2020, threatening to bar unlinked lines. NIN enrolment rose from under 40 million to over 90 million by 2023, a major expansion despite widespread enrolment centre congestion and repeated deadline extensions.

Following years of public complaints, promised to overhaul the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) and improve police accountability, culminating in a formal disbandment announcement in October 2020 amid the #EndSARS protests.

SARS was announced disbanded on 11 October 2020, but was rapidly replaced by a similarly-staffed unit (SWAT), and the 20 October 2020 Lekki Toll Gate shooting of #EndSARS protesters — which a Lagos State judicial panel later found amounted to unlawful killing by security forces — went without any federal prosecution. Most of the five-point #EndSARS demands, including panel recommendations on compensation and prosecution, were left unimplemented by the end of the term.

Promised to fix the Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna refineries so Nigeria could refine its own crude instead of importing nearly all its petrol.

Multiple turnaround maintenance (TAM) contracts were awarded across the two terms, including a $1.5 billion rehabilitation contract for Port Harcourt signed in 2021. None of the state refineries returned to meaningful, sustained production capacity before Buhari left office in May 2023; Nigeria continued importing the vast majority of its refined petroleum products throughout his presidency.

Promised to revive and strengthen the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) with Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Benin to fight Boko Haram and ISWAP across the Lake Chad Basin.

The MNJTF was reactivated and conducted joint operations that reclaimed significant territory from Boko Haram in 2015–2016. However, coordination between member states was inconsistent, funding lagged pledges, and ISWAP exploited gaps to entrench itself in the Lake Chad islands, sustaining a cross-border insurgency through the end of Buhari's term.