Between January 1984 and August 1993 Nigeria ran through a dense cluster of policies that each had to be wound back. Four stand out.
## Decree 4 of 1984 (Buhari)
The Public Officers (Protection Against False Accusation) Decree No. 4 of 1984 made it an offence to publish any report — even a true one — that could embarrass a government official. Two Guardian journalists, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, were jailed under the decree for a story about diplomatic postings. Decree 4 was repealed by Babangida on 26 August 1985, within days of the 27 August 1985 palace coup against Buhari. The repeal was the first signal of the Babangida regime's positioning as a "human rights" alternative.
## Counter-Trade (1984–85)
Facing collapsed oil prices and refusing IMF conditionality, the Buhari regime entered counter-trade deals — exchanging Nigerian crude oil directly for manufactured goods from Brazil (cars), Austria (steel), France (rolling stock) and several Eastern European countries (textiles). The deals were intransparent, the pricing arbitrary, and the merchandise (especially the Austrian Steyr trucks) routinely defective. Babangida wound down counter-trade in 1986 as part of the SAP package; the regime's auditors found that Nigeria had received roughly 60 cents on the dollar of notional crude value.
## Ghana-Must-Go (January 1983)
The Shagari government's January 1983 Executive Order expelled roughly 2 million West African migrants — about 1 million Ghanaians, plus Togolese, Beninois, Nigerien and Chadian workers — within two weeks. The bags they used (cheap red-white-blue chequered polyester sacks) became known continent-wide as "Ghana Must Go". The expulsion poisoned regional relations for a decade and was a contributing factor to the diplomatic isolation Nigeria faced under both Buhari and Abacha. The policy was never formally reversed (no executive order rescinded it) but was de facto reversed by the 1990 ECOWAS Protocol on Free Movement, which Nigeria signed.
## SAP and the May 1989 riots
Babangida's June 1986 Structural Adjustment Programme — naira devaluation from ₦1 = $1.50 to roughly ₦7 = $1, removal of petroleum subsidies, dismantling of marketing boards, privatisation programme — produced the May/June 1989 anti-SAP riots. Universities (Ahmadu Bello, Bayero, Lagos, Ibadan, Benin) closed; at least 50 students were killed in Benin City and Lagos; the regime suspended elements of the SAP package (notably the petroleum price increase) and announced palliatives — the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI) and the People's Bank — which were absorbed by graft within three years. The SAP itself was never reversed; the political pressure simply pushed it underground.
## What the reversals taught
The Fourth Republic inherited the IBB-era lesson: every painful adjustment policy must be accompanied by visible palliatives, and the palliatives will be looted. See Naira Devaluations Register and Fuel Subsidy Story.