DistantNews
Support us
🇳🇬 Nigeria /Economy & Trade

Tanimu Yakubu: Widespread Poverty, Hardship Can’t Be Blamed on Tinubu’s Economic Reforms

From ThisDay · () English

Summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources Context piece
  • Nigeria's Director-General of the Budget Office, Tanimu Yakubu, stated that widespread poverty is not solely due to President Tinubu's economic reforms.
  • He argued that Nigeria's economic hardship stems from long-standing structural weaknesses, not recent policy changes.
  • Yakubu cited improvements in GDP growth and international reserves as evidence that reforms are beginning to address these issues.

Nigeria's economic reforms under President Bola Tinubu are not the cause of the nation's widespread poverty and hardship, according to Tanimu Yakubu, the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation. Yakubu asserted that the country entered the reform period burdened by deep-rooted economic weaknesses that predate the current administration's policies.

In a statement titled "Poverty, Reform and the Problem of Causation," Yakubu distinguished between the historical conditions that created Nigeria's poverty crisis and the current policies aimed at resolving it. He acknowledged the real suffering of Nigerians, referencing World Bank data that indicates a significant portion of the population lives below the poverty line or is vulnerable to falling into it. However, he cautioned against a simplistic interpretation of these figures, emphasizing the need for a nuanced assessment.

The pain is real; the conclusion does not follow automatically.

— Tanimu YakubuThe Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, explaining that the persistence of poverty does not automatically mean the reforms caused the hardship.

Yakubu detailed the accumulated structural weaknesses, including low productivity, foreign exchange distortions, fiscal leakages, unreliable power supply, insecurity, poor infrastructure, and weak job creation. He also pointed to the former fuel subsidy regime and ongoing fiscal leakages as significant pressures on public finances. These issues, he argued, have been accumulating for years and cannot be automatically blamed on the reforms initiated in 2023.

As evidence that the reforms are beginning to yield positive results, Yakubu pointed to improvements in key macroeconomic indicators. He cited World Bank data projecting Nigeria's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth at 4% for 2025, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also estimating 4% growth for the same year and projecting 4.1% for 2026. These figures, he suggested, indicate that the reform program is starting to address some of the nation's persistent structural problems.

Poverty, Reform and the Problem of Causation

— Tanimu YakubuThe title of the statement released by Yakubu addressing the economic situation in Nigeria.
About this summary

Originally published by ThisDay. Summarized and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

More Stories

From Our Blog