ABUJA, NIGERIA — Tensions are running high in the streets here, days after the removal of gasoline subsidies at the start of the year and two weeks after horrific Christmas Day bombings of several churches around the country by Islamist radicals.

Yet the government of President Goodluck Jonathan is steering through these hazards, giving Nigeria a chance to cast off the instability, poverty and corruption that have long plagued this country. And Nigeria’s powerful governors, for the moment, are coalescing around the reform agenda.

Meeting with the president and his economic team in Abuja last week, in the midst of protests against the subsidy removal, confirmed my view that the Nigerian government has an unprecedented opportunity to clean up its act and win back the support of a long-suffering population. The president spoke of taking the tough medicine necessary to build the foundations for long-term growth. His lead economic architect is Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, newly returned from a top spot at the World Bank.

I don’t envy their task. At 155 million people and rising, Nigeria is the world’s eighth-most-populous country and one of the hardest to govern. The country is deeply splintered, with more than 250 ethnic groups, 500 languages, a stark and sometimes violent Muslim-Christian divide, and a population now evenly divided between urban and rural areas. If these fracture lines were not enough, corruption is rampant, income inequality is sky-high, poverty and disease are pervasive, and the youth population is bulging, with half of all Nigerians under the age of 20.