After the 1981-1985 oil-price collapse pushed Nigeria into balance-of-payments crisis, the Buhari regime (1984-1985) attempted orthodox adjustment without formal IMF agreement, using import licensing and austerity. After Babangida's 1985 coup, a national debate rejected an explicit IMF loan but the government nonetheless implemented an IMF-designed Structural Adjustment Programme from July 1986: establishment of a Second-Tier Foreign Exchange Market (SFEM) with substantial naira depreciation, abolition of import licensing and commodity marketing boards (cocoa, palm oil, groundnut), liberalisation of banking entry, tariff rationalisation, and commercialisation / privatisation of selected state-owned enterprises under the Technical Committee on Privatisation and Commercialisation (1988). Petroleum subsidies were reduced but not eliminated. Inflation spiked, the naira depreciated sharply, manufacturing employment contracted, and the welfare effects were widely contested; the programme is commonly cited as the archetype of a Washington- Consensus adjustment that failed to generate sustained growth in a rentier oil economy without complementary institutional reform. The SAP era ended politically with the annulled 1993 election and transition to Abacha.
Policy-content fingerprint — how the framework codes this movement on its axes