NGScorecard

Pledged to fully deregulate the downstream petroleum sector and remove the fuel subsidy, arguing the savings would be redirected to infrastructure and social investment.

Subsidy was removed on 1 January 2012, sending the pump price from ₦65 to ₦141 overnight. Nationwide 'Occupy Nigeria' protests and an eight-day general strike forced a partial reversal within two weeks, settling the price at ₦97. Full deregulation was never revisited for the rest of the term, and subsidy costs continued to consume a large share of oil revenue.

Promised to complete the long-delayed privatisation of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) successor companies, ending decades of state monopoly over generation and distribution.

The handover of 15 of the 17 unbundled PHCN successor companies to private core investors was completed on 1 November 2013 — one of the signature structural reforms of the administration. However, the privatisation alone did not translate into materially improved supply, as the new owners inherited undercapitalised, poorly metered networks.

The Transformation Agenda pledged to grow agriculture, solid minerals, and manufacturing to reduce Nigeria's dependence on crude oil revenue.

Agriculture and services grew as a share of a rebased GDP, and the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (Growth Enhancement Scheme, e-wallet fertiliser vouchers) reached millions of farmers. However, oil still accounted for the overwhelming majority of export earnings and roughly 70% of government revenue at the end of the term, leaving the economy exposed when crude prices collapsed in late 2014.

Pledged to contain and defeat the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East, including through a state of emergency and expanded military deployment.

Rather than being contained, the insurgency escalated dramatically: a state of emergency was declared across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa in May 2013, yet by early 2015 Boko Haram controlled territory roughly the size of Belgium, including local government headquarters. The group renamed itself a 'caliphate' in 2014, and the Baga massacre in January 2015 was one of the deadliest single attacks in the insurgency's history.

After 276 schoolgirls were abducted from Chibok, Borno State in April 2014, the government pledged an urgent, well-resourced rescue operation.

The government's initial public response was widely criticised as slow and, for several days, dismissive of the scale of the abduction, prompting the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign. By the time Jonathan left office in May 2015, none of the 276 girls had been rescued or released — the first group releases would not occur until later in 2016 and 2017 under the succeeding administration.

Promised to reform INEC and deliver elections free of the widespread rigging that had discredited the 2007 general election.

Under INEC chairman Attahiru Jega, the 2011 general election was widely assessed by domestic and international observers as the most credible in Nigeria's Fourth Republic to that point, despite post-election violence in parts of the North. The 2015 election, which Jonathan lost, was likewise judged broadly credible, and his prompt concession — the first by a sitting Nigerian president — was internationally praised as a milestone for democratic consolidation.

Pledged to finally sign into law a Freedom of Information bill that had been stalled in the National Assembly for over a decade.

Jonathan signed the Freedom of Information Act on 28 May 2011, giving Nigerians a legal right to request government records for the first time. Implementation was inconsistent across MDAs from the outset, but the law itself was a genuine, long-overdue structural reform delivered within his first year.

Promised to replace the depleted Excess Crude Account with a properly governed Sovereign Wealth Fund to save oil revenue for future generations and stabilise the budget against price shocks.

The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) was established by an Act of the National Assembly in 2011 and began operations in 2012 with an initial $1 billion seed capital, split into stabilisation, future generations, and infrastructure funds. Several state governors resisted contributing further funds, limiting its growth, but the institution itself was a durable reform that survived into later administrations.

Committed to updating Nigeria's GDP base year, last revised in 1990, to give a more accurate picture of the economy's true size and structure.

The National Bureau of Statistics rebased GDP in April 2014, moving the base year from 1990 to 2010 and capturing previously uncounted sectors like telecoms, Nollywood, and services. The exercise nearly doubled measured GDP from about $270 billion to $510 billion overnight, making Nigeria Africa's largest economy by official statistics, ahead of South Africa.

Pledged to continue and consolidate the Presidential Amnesty Programme for Niger Delta ex-militants, launched in 2009, and address the region's underlying environmental and developmental grievances.

The amnesty programme continued to pay stipends and fund training for over 26,000 ex-agitators, and the relative calm allowed oil production to recover through most of the term. However, remediation of oil-polluted land and the promised industrialisation of the Niger Delta made little visible progress, leaving the underlying grievances unresolved.

Promised to convene a National Conference to address long-standing calls for restructuring, resource control, and constitutional reform.

The National Conference convened in March 2014 with 492 delegates and produced a report in August 2014 with recommendations on devolution of powers, resource control, and state creation. Jonathan received the report but never formally transmitted its recommendations to the National Assembly for legislative action before leaving office, and the report was effectively shelved.

The Transformation Agenda targeted sustained annual GDP growth in the high single digits to accelerate poverty reduction.

Real GDP growth averaged a respectable 4.5-6.3% across most of the term, and the rebased 2014 figures showed a larger and more diversified economy than previously measured. Growth slowed sharply in the final two quarters of the term as the oil price crash and election-related uncertainty took hold, and the target range of sustained double-digit growth was never reached.

Pledged mass job creation through the Transformation Agenda's industrialisation, agriculture, and youth employment schemes such as YouWin.

The YouWin business plan competition and SURE-P graduate internship scheme created employment for tens of thousands of young Nigerians, but these programmes were too small relative to the scale of new entrants to the labour market each year. NBS unemployment figures rose across most of the term, even accounting for repeated methodology changes that make like-for-like comparison difficult.

Pledged zero tolerance for corruption and stronger enforcement by the EFCC and ICPC.

The term was marked by a string of high-profile scandals — the 2012 fuel subsidy fraud probe, the police pension fund theft, the Stella Oduah car procurement scandal, and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi's unremitted NNPC funds allegation — with few convictions and several officials, including Sanusi himself, facing what critics called retaliation for whistleblowing rather than the underlying wrongdoers facing consequences.

Promised to overhaul pension administration after years of complaints that retirees, especially police pensioners, were not being paid.

The 2012 discovery that a mid-level Police Pension Office official, John Yusuf, had stolen roughly ₦2 billion in pension funds became a national scandal, worsened when a court handed him a fine and suspended sentence in 2013 rather than jail time, triggering public outrage. Structural pension reform stalled, and complaints about delayed and unpaid federal pensions persisted through to the end of the term.

Promised to finally deliver a long-demanded second bridge across the River Niger connecting Anambra and Delta states, to relieve congestion on the ageing 1965 bridge.

Jonathan's government structured public–private financing for the bridge, engaged a contractor and held a groundbreaking ceremony in March 2014, but the ceremony was largely symbolic and no substantive construction had begun when he left office in May 2015. The financing arrangement was reworked and main construction started only in 2018, under his successor.