President Bola Tinubu recently made a remarkable declaration about not going back to Egypt during a meeting at the Aso Rock Villa with City Boys, the campaign group driven by his son, Seyi Tinubu.
He declared:
“I came and I removed subsidy the first day. I knew Nigeria would go bankrupt. There was nothing left to pay subsidy. I could listen to my political opponents promising a return to subsidy.
“I remember my scripture studies, both in the Bible and in the Holy Quran. When Moses and Musa left Egypt, they faced a challenge, and the Red Sea parted and gave way. You cannot ask Moses to go back to Egypt.
“With your energy and support, we will never go back to Egypt. No regrets.”
Apparently, he was responding to former Vice President of Nigeria, Waziri Adamawa, Atiku Abubakar, an African Democratic Congress (ADC) presidential hopeful, who has promised to restore fuel subsidy if elected in 2027.
Tinubu argued that removing petrol subsidy was necessary, pointing to the fact that Nigeria’s economy is now growing at 4.6%, alongside several other positive indicators that demonstrate the country’s improving macroeconomic performance.
It is no coincidence that, on the same day, Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele warned that a return to fuel subsidy could push the exchange rate to ₦4,000 to the dollar and petrol prices to ₦5,000 per litre.
To further contextualise the “no going back to Egypt” remark, it is important to stress that Tinubu was also responding to concerns among some Nigerians who fear that the petrol price discount and modulation measures announced by the minister on October 8 could be a disguised attempt to reintroduce fuel subsidy. Opposition politicians and concerned Nigerians have characterised the measures as a possible return to subsidy under a complex policy terminology.
In addition, the President’s statement may have been a direct response to officials of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who recently cautioned Nigeria against restoring fuel subsidy during the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings in Thailand. Some opposition leaders have been promising to reinstate the subsidy if elected, and, given the biting cost-of-living crisis, the proposition is becoming increasingly appealing to some Nigerians.
Incidentally, on September 1, nearly two months ago, I wrote a piece in this column titled “The Petrol Subsidy Dependency Syndrome and 2027 Elections.” In it, I began examining President Tinubu’s bold but painful reforms and explaining why the significant improvements recorded at the macroeconomic level have yet to translate into corresponding relief at the microeconomic level.
I cautioned that the administration must not allow itself to be stampeded into reversing the reforms that have enabled it to achieve significant macroeconomic improvements. An excerpt from that article is reproduced below:
“I recalled that, at about the same time in 1973, some 53 years ago, a temporary measure was introduced to cushion the effects of a sharp increase in international oil prices following the outbreak of the conflict between Israel and the Arab world, known as the Yom Kippur War.
“Arab oil producers, in solidarity with Egypt, which had invaded Israel, launched what became known as the OPEC oil embargo. That event quadrupled the price of crude oil from $3 to $12 per barrel. To help Nigerians cope with the shock, the then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, introduced petroleum subsidy, which was supposed to be a temporary measure.
“However, it gradually became a form of entitlement that the masses were reluctant to relinquish, even though the elite had been among the greatest beneficiaries of the largesse.
“These policies continued indefinitely because no end date was specified when they were introduced or enacted, as the case might be.
“Measures similar to those introduced by General Gowon to ameliorate the effects of the 1973 oil price shock are now being adopted by leaders in Europe and East Asia, who are reducing or removing taxes on petroleum products to help their citizens weather the storm of high energy costs.
“The difference between temporary policy measures in Nigeria and those adopted by European and East Asian countries is that, whereas Nigeria’s measures were open-ended and consequently became perpetual, the governments of those countries stipulated clear end dates from the outset.”
I further argued:
“Now, a cross-section of Nigerians is referring to the measures taken by leaders in other jurisdictions to cushion the effects of oil price shocks on their citizens and is calling on President Tinubu to do the same.
“Would the Nigerian President follow the example of his contemporaries around the world, or would he prefer not to ‘go back to Egypt’, just as the Israelites, according to the biblical account, did not want to return to Egypt after crossing the Red Sea?
“It is a decision that the President must make in light of the fact that petrol prices have risen by about 80%. However, if he decides to intervene, I reckon that it may be through tax relief, with clearly defined commencement and end dates.”
I concluded:
“The lesson to be learnt from the standpoint of public policy formulation is that, to avoid the kind of situation in which Nigeria has found itself, temporary measures should always have clearly defined starting and ending dates.”
Remarkably, my advice to President Tinubu not to reverse the petrol subsidy removal policy, using the analogy of not going back to Egypt, was offered more than a month ago, as the excerpts above demonstrate.
It is gratifying that the President has now echoed the same expression. Last week, he declared, “We are not going back to Egypt,” underscoring his administration’s resolve not to return Nigeria to the petrol subsidy regime that he jettisoned on May 29, 2023, during his inaugural address as President of Nigeria.
It is worth recalling that on May 29, 2023, President Bola Tinubu removed the fuel subsidy, thereby saving an estimated ₦4 trillion. Subsequently, the naira was floated, and over the past three years, Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate has climbed back to the 4.3–4.6 per cent range, its highest level in ten years. Similarly, banks declared profits of ₦6.7 trillion in 2024, the highest in our history.
Yet, in the same year, 133 million Nigerians were living in multidimensional poverty, according to a recent World Bank survey.
This poverty is reflected in the daily lives of Nigerians. For instance, the cost of transportation from Oshodi to CMS in Lagos has quadrupled, rising from ₦300 to ₦1,200, while the price of a basket of tomatoes has increased from ₦15,000 to ₦60,000.
Although the high cost of tomatoes and other foodstuffs is also attributable to insecurity, which has spread across the hinterland, farmers in Bauchi, Benue and Plateau states—areas renowned for their contributions to Nigeria’s food supply—are increasingly afraid of being kidnapped for ransom or killed. Consequently, many farmers have been displaced by bandits and forced to relocate to internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Their inability to continue farming has further contributed to food insecurity.
This situation is compounded by the reality that the high cost of transportation arising from petrol subsidy removal can account for as much as 40–60 per cent of the value of food transported from the hinterland. This underscores the pivotal role transportation plays, particularly in Nigeria, where road transport remains the dominant mode of mobility. In contrast, rail and water transport infrastructure, which form the backbone of transportation in industrialised and advanced economies, are either lacking or poorly developed in our country.
The scenario described above amounts to a double jeopardy for Nigerians, as insecurity and fuel subsidy removal have combined to compound the hardship endured by the long-suffering masses. It is therefore understandable, though deeply troubling, that the European Union (EU) representative in Nigeria, Ambassador Gautier Mignot, recently referred to our country as probably the poverty capital of the world in a media statement.
The situation described above illustrates the paradox I referred to as the Macro-Micro Disconnect in my intervention in this column last week, titled “Still on Economic Growth: From Macro to Micro Level via Bottom-Up Stimulation.”
The economy grew, but the well-being of the masses declined.
Against this backdrop, the question is not whether the plethora of reforms undertaken by the Tinubu administration across multiple sectors of Nigeria’s socioeconomic life was necessary. They were. The question is: How does wealth in a nation actually trickle down from the macroeconomic level to the microeconomic level, and why has this failed to happen in Nigeria?
Economics textbooks often assume that wealth trickles down automatically. This appears to be the approach and expectation of the incumbent administration. The reality, however, is that the process must be deliberately facilitated or triggered.
If you like, you could say that the microeconomic level must be artificially inseminated to enable it to grow faster and converge with the benefits trickling down from the macroeconomic level. Without deliberate intervention, this process takes much longer—a lag universally acknowledged by economists, as I noted in my article last week.
Again, it would appear that Mr President has responded to this clarion call by introducing the 90-Day Cost of Living Alleviation Plan on October 25, 2026.
In the earlier essay I referenced, I argued that President Tinubu ended the consumption-driven petrol subsidy regime on May 29, 2023, without replacing it with an alternative underpinned by production.
The 90-Day Cost of Living Alleviation Plan, which he announced on October 25, should arguably have been activated on May 29, 2023, when petrol subsidy removal was announced, nearly three and a half years ago. But, as the conventional wisdom goes, it is better late than never.
One is not unaware of the US$1 billion earmarked for the adoption of compressed natural gas (CNG). However, much of this investment has focused on mobility solutions for approximately one per cent of Nigerians, particularly civil and public servants and others living in urban centres. This has largely neglected the masses, especially farmers and those engaged in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), who reside predominantly in rural areas and constitute roughly 70 per cent of Nigeria’s population. These are the people who should be driving economic growth in our country.
The reality outlined above suggests that there is a problem with providing CNG conversion kits primarily for mass-transit buses and vehicles used by urban dwellers while leaving rural residents, who constitute a significant proportion of the Nigerian population, behind. Unlike city dwellers, many rural residents do not commute by buses and cars but rely on kekes and okadas for mobility.
Worse still, the CNG pathway risks promoting capital outflows from Nigeria because the conversion kits are imported from India. Consequently, a significant portion of the US$1 billion being invested in the CNG initiative flows out of Nigeria and into India. This effectively means that Nigeria is exporting capital instead of retaining it within, and attracting further investment into, the domestic economy.
The priority should be to ensure that investments of this magnitude stimulate domestic economic activity, allowing the funds to percolate down to the microeconomic level and generate wealth among the masses at the grassroots.
By the same token, Nigeria has been exporting jobs to India and other countries from which it imports CNG conversion kits.
This is because manufacturing the kits in India creates jobs there, while a growing number of unemployed Nigerians are denied employment opportunities that could arise if such production activities were undertaken locally. Given the enormity of the investment in CNG—US$1 billion—why is there no plan to establish a plant for manufacturing CNG conversion kits in Nigeria? Such a facility could reduce the current outflow of capital to India and other countries from which the kits are imported.
Beyond the challenge of manufacturing CNG conversion kits, which may currently exceed Nigeria’s demonstrated industrial capacity and therefore require partnerships with Indian manufacturers, concentrating mobility solutions in urban centres also means neglecting the large number of unemployed Nigerians who could earn a living by operating kekes and okadas. These operators could provide essential transport services to help evacuate food from rural areas to the cities, where it is needed most.
Incidentally, providing electric okadas and kekes would be a double-edged sword, creating mobility solutions for rural dwellers while providing a viable means of livelihood for operators.
Without initiatives such as those I am recommending above, the development that has accrued at the macroeconomic level, which I discussed extensively last week, will continue to elude people at the microeconomic level. Consequently, the benefits have failed to trickle down quickly enough to prevent those on the lower rungs of the societal ladder from becoming increasingly frustrated. This situation is understandably irksome to President Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
A possible remedy to this predicament, which I might describe as a form of prickly heat, is needed to ease the pressure the APC is currently facing from opposition politicians calling for a return to the petrol subsidy regime. The intensity of this pressure appears to have caused some panic within the administration. Hence, on October 8, Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele announced a petrol pump-price discount and modulation mechanism intended to peg the price of petrol at ₦1,350 per litre. However, the initiative has complicated the debate over fuel subsidy removal because of the complexity of the process.
Impressively, once again, President Tinubu has demonstrated courage in leadership by dousing the tension and anxiety with his “no going back to Egypt” declaration on October 19.
Incidentally, tinkering with the petrol subsidy removal policy, which many Nigerians believed was a settled matter, effectively reopened the debate and made the APC appear vulnerable, particularly as the 2027 general elections draw nearer.
However, Tinubu’s pronouncement during his meeting with City Boys ended speculation that a reversal of petrol subsidy removal was imminent.
Be that as it may, there is an alternative pathway to providing faster financial relief to Nigerians being crushed by the global energy crisis. I pointed it out in this column last week but did not elaborate on it. I intend to do so in this intervention by highlighting the channels through which wealth can cascade more rapidly from the macroeconomic level to the microeconomic level. The absence or weakness of these channels explains why the pain of reform is still being felt at the base of the economic pyramid, also known as the grassroots.
Basically, the 90-Day Cost of Living Alleviation Plan announced by the administration on October 25, 2026, is, in my view, part of the response to the weaknesses identified in a system where Nigeria enjoys robust macroeconomic growth but continues to grapple with crippling microeconomic outcomes.
Below are the six channels through which wealth should trickle down but which Nigeria has either neglected or failed to make sufficiently effective. This explains why the trickle-down effect has yet to materialise and why those at the base of the pyramid are still waiting to feel the benefits of the bold, initially painful reforms embarked upon by President Tinubu’s administration.
(1) The Wage Channel — Profits Did Not Become Pay
In a functioning economy, corporate profits translate into higher wages and more employment. Companies make money, hire more workers, increase salaries and, in the process, contribute to a more prosperous society.
Curiously, however, Nigeria’s banks recorded post-reform profits of ₦6.7 trillion, yet youth unemployment remained above 40 per cent. Much of these profits was distributed as dividends to the relatively small proportion of Nigerians who own bank shares rather than being translated into higher wages and broader employment opportunities for the majority.
Economists describe such growth without commensurate job creation as extraction rather than development.
As a solution, why not create an intervention fund to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), where the majority of Nigerians engaged in economic activities earn their livelihoods?
Not many small-business owners can afford bank loans carrying interest rates of 30–40 per cent. By providing loans at single-digit interest rates, SMEs would be better positioned to remain in business, contribute to GDP growth, create employment and expand productive activities.
(2) The Price Channel — Macroeconomic Savings Became Microeconomic Inflation
In theory, fuel subsidy removal should improve economic efficiency and eventually help bring inflation down.
In practice, however, removing the fuel subsidy increased the cost of virtually everything that moves. In Nigeria, almost everything is transported by road rather than by waterways or rail, which can offer cheaper alternatives where adequate infrastructure exists.
Consequently, the ₦4 trillion the government saved was, in effect, collected back from citizens through higher transportation costs, amounting to a form of ₦4 trillion transport tax. Put succinctly, we privatised the fiscal deficit: the government balanced its books by unbalancing household budgets and increasing the cost of living.
Critics have consequently argued that the government has robbed Peter—the people—to pay Paul—the government—particularly at the subnational level, where state governments are currently benefiting from increased allocations.
A viable solution would be to set aside a significant portion of the savings from subsidy removal to support SMEs, with the funds disbursed through a dedicated task force.
A task force similar to the one implementing the CNG initiative could be established to implement this proposal. It may be argued that such interventions fall within the purview of the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) and the Bank of Industry (BOI).
My counterargument is that the bureaucracy associated with such government agencies is partly responsible for the delay in ensuring that economic growth trickles down from the macroeconomic to the microeconomic level.
(3) The Employment Multiplier — One Job Did Not Create Five
One factory job in Aba, Lagos or Port Harcourt should generate several additional jobs for others, including drivers, food vendors and fabric sellers. This is the employment multiplier effect.
Unfortunately, Nigeria did not channel its subsidy savings sufficiently into building factories and expanding productive capacity. Instead, some of the resources have gone towards servicing debt and funding CNG-powered buses and related infrastructure under a programme reportedly costing US$1 billion, primarily serving an estimated one to two per cent of commuters.
The multiplier effect has therefore remained limited because the productive base needed to generate it has not been adequately developed.
The solution, in my view, is to encourage the assembly of CNG conversion kits in Nigeria in partnership with Indian suppliers. That way, a significant portion of the US$1 billion dedicated to transitioning to CNG would be retained within Nigeria, creating jobs in the local economy, as it should.
(4) The Fiscal Transfer Channel — The Broken Bridge
This is arguably the most important channel because it provides the bridge between macroeconomic gains and microeconomic welfare.
Countries undertaking serious reforms, including Indonesia and India, have used various mechanisms to cushion the immediate impact of fuel subsidy reforms. These have included cash transfers, student financing and healthcare support. The precise mix of interventions differs from country to country, but the underlying principle remains the same: savings from subsidy reform must translate into tangible benefits for citizens.
Nigeria, however, removed a consumption subsidy without replacing it with a sufficiently effective alternative that ordinary citizens could feel. Worse still, some of the palliatives introduced failed to reach their intended beneficiaries adequately.
Although conditional cash transfers have reportedly improved, with a recent survey indicating that they have reached approximately 10 million vulnerable members of society, and the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has disbursed at least ₦350 billion, benefiting roughly 1.6 million students, these interventions have yet to make the necessary impact on the scale required.
My argument has always been simple: the developmental value of subsidy removal lies not in the removal itself, but in what replaces it. Remove consumption subsidies and replace them with production subsidies.
Fuel is a consumption subsidy: it is burned within a relatively short time, leaves no lasting productive asset and disproportionately benefits those who consume more fuel, including affluent car owners.
By contrast, a NELFUND student loan is a form of investment in productive capacity. It can create an asset in the form of an educated and skilled individual whose contribution to the economy may span 40 years. It also expands opportunities for people from less privileged backgrounds, with the revolving-loan mechanism allowing repayments to support future beneficiaries.
Similarly, a keke acquired through a lease-to-own arrangement can create an entrepreneur-owner who earns a living and supports a family over many years.
Beyond conditional cash transfers and NELFUND, as I argued in this column last week, there is another intervention worth considering. Schools have just reopened, and many parents struggled to find the funds to pay school fees for their children and wards. I was personally inundated with requests for assistance. One is not the government, so there is a limit to what one can do.
Why not identify indigent families and support them with school-fee vouchers for primary and secondary education?
NELFUND already covers university education, but fees at nursery, primary and secondary school levels remain a major source of distress for a significant number of parents who are keen to give their children a Western education to prepare them for the future.
Yes, the proposal above involves a subsidy, but it is a subsidy for production, as opposed to a subsidy on petrol, which supports consumption.
(5) The Infrastructure Channel — Europe’s Rail System Versus Nigeria’s Roads
In London, government support for public transportation helps reduce the fares passengers pay. Commuters may not always see the subsidy directly, but they experience its benefits through more affordable mobility.
In fact, in the UK, adults aged 60 and above can enjoy free train travel under certain concessionary schemes.
This is one way wealth is redistributed in Europe: through support for public transportation and the reduction of commuting costs.
In Nigeria, we subsidised fuel, which made it possible for vehicles to move, but we did not adequately subsidise mobility itself. The average Lagos worker may spend as much as 40–60 per cent of daily earnings on transportation. No nation can prosper sustainably when its workers have to spend such a substantial proportion of their income simply getting to work.
My proposal to deploy 500,000 electric kekes through a lease-to-own arrangement, using the same US$1 billion being spent on CNG buses, is therefore not merely about providing vehicles. It is about recreating the benefits of affordable mobility by subsidising movement rather than fuel.
Reducing the cost of getting to work would increase disposable income and improve productivity. This is similar to what the Obasanjo administration did when it introduced kekes through a scheme managed by my namesake, Magnus Kpakol, to ease transportation costs.
President Tinubu can adopt that playbook.
(6) The Credit Channel — Reverse Trickle-Down
Macroeconomic growth should strengthen banks’ deposit base and enable them to lend to small businesses at affordable interest rates.
Nigeria has, however, experienced the reverse.
With the Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) at 27.5 per cent at the time, banks could take deposits from market women at interest rates of about five per cent and lend to the government at yields approaching 25 per cent. Instead of wealth trickling down from the macroeconomic level to small businesses, it flows upwards from the microeconomic level to the macroeconomic level.
Although the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has recently reduced the benchmark interest rate to 23 per cent, the period since the reduction has been too short to determine whether it will meaningfully reactivate manufacturing, the powerhouse of sustainable economic growth.
A comparison with Indonesia is instructive. Indonesia boasts an economy worth approximately US$1.1 trillion, with manufacturing contributing roughly a quarter of its economic output. By contrast, Nigeria’s manufacturing sector contributes only about eight per cent of GDP, while the country’s economy remains below US$500 billion in size.
Until a trader in Onitsha, Kano, Abuja, Ibadan, Maiduguri or Warri can borrow at an affordable rate comparable to the approximately nine per cent available to a counterpart in Kigali, Rwanda, Nigeria will continue to experience trickle-up rather than trickle-down economics.
While it is understandable that the CBN cannot bring bank lending rates down overnight, it has already taken a step in the right direction by reducing the benchmark interest rate to 23 per cent, as highlighted earlier.
President Tinubu can do more by establishing special intervention funds to enable SMEs, which are the engine of the economy, to thrive.
Of course, if the recommended task forces are established, they should have clearly defined commencement and end dates, as I have been advocating, to prevent temporary policies from becoming perpetual. This was what happened with petrol price subsidies and the centralisation of the policing system, both of which were introduced as temporary measures but remained in place ad infinitum until the Tinubu administration began addressing these longstanding policy challenges.
Finally: Wealth Does Not Trickle Down by Gravity; It Trickles Down by Design
A robust framework for ensuring that wealth trickles down has yet to be put in place in Nigeria. As I acknowledged earlier, the 90-Day Cost of Living Alleviation Initiative is a good starting point. Upon his re-election, President Tinubu must do more by establishing task forces to overcome the bureaucratic bottlenecks that impede development from trickling down quickly enough for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid to feel its impact and enjoy the so-called dividends of democracy.
For instance, and for the sake of emphasis, why can’t a significant percentage of government revenue, instead of being shared among the states through the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC), be set aside to fund initiatives that would ameliorate the suffering of the masses?
The reality is that we have placed too much confidence in CNG as the panacea for the challenges arising from petrol subsidy removal. We are now faced with the fact that the CNG pathway is only a small part of the solution. Even then, as stated earlier, it has yet to be deployed in ways that adequately benefit the approximately 70 per cent of Nigerians who live in rural areas, where support for productive activities is most urgently needed.
Again, this gap can be addressed by deploying the unspent portion of the US$1 billion allocated to the CNG initiative to support okadas, kekes, fishing boats, tractors and harvesters in rural communities where farming and other productive activities continue. Such investments would improve mobility, expand agricultural productivity and facilitate the transportation of food from rural areas to urban markets.
For three and a half years, we have behaved as though reform itself were the destination. The reality, however, is that reform is only the beginning. Removing the fuel subsidy created fiscal space. What we have done with that space has defined the results of the reform so far.
We must now adopt a simple national rule: every naira saved from consumption subsidies should be reinvested in production subsidies. This could include supporting existing automobile assembly plants to adapt their production lines to manufacture more electric kekes and okadas, which could serve as our equivalent of the mass transit systems provided by trains in advanced economies.
That was the case I made in this column last week, and I am reiterating it this week.
Not palliatives. Not handouts. But production.
This means student loans, electric kekes, solar-powered cold rooms for preserving farm produce, and low-interest loans for a tailor in Aba, Kaduna or Gwagwalada. These interventions would stimulate growth from the bottom up rather than leave the masses waiting for wealth to trickle down.
That is how wealth cascades down.
Speeches about GDP growth intended to restore hope are welcome, but the government must engage with the people and earn their confidence through practical interventions that reduce the cost of living and increase their capacity to earn a living, as outlined in the preceding paragraphs.
It is therefore a welcome development that the government has introduced the 90-Day Cost of Living Alleviation Initiative to provide succour to long-suffering Nigerians who are struggling to keep their heads above water, as it were.
Once again, subsidise production, not consumption. That is the bridge from the macroeconomic to the microeconomic level and the path Nigeria’s policymakers must follow to achieve meaningful poverty alleviation.
Meanwhile, some Nigerians labour under the illusion that, because Nigeria is richly endowed with natural resources such as crude oil, they are entitled to enjoy low petrol prices. This partly explains the pervasive sense of entitlement and persistent resistance to petrol subsidy removal.
In my view, those who hold this position overlook a fundamental reality: for many years, Nigeria failed to refine much of its crude oil domestically. Instead, we exported crude oil and imported refined petroleum products at considerable expense. In effect, we exported our God-given wealth cheaply and imported petroleum products at exorbitant costs.
That is the focus of my forthcoming book, Africa: Exporting Wealth, Importing Poverty.
This failure of enterprise and domestic productive capacity resulted in our country exporting wealth while importing poverty, a central theme of my forthcoming book, Africa: Exporting Wealth, Importing Poverty, which is scheduled to be publicly unveiled at an African Union meeting early next year.
The Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical Industry appears to have broken that jinx, with refined petroleum products from Nigeria, rather than crude oil, now being sought after in markets around the world, from Saudi Arabia to Japan.
Next week, I will examine how a lack of enterprise has contributed to Nigeria becoming one of the countries with the highest levels of poverty in the world—a position historically associated with India, which has since emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies following bold reforms.
Nigeria must learn from such experiences and build on the bold reform initiatives of the Tinubu administration, adapting them to reverse the country’s poverty trajectory and ensure that macroeconomic gains translate into tangible improvements in the lives of ordinary Nigerians.
Remarkably, the United States of America (USA) offered Americans a 7.5 per cent tax credit for purchasing electric vehicles (EVs) when it decided that a transition from fossil-fuel-powered cars to EVs was necessary. It did not matter that the policy would benefit Elon Musk, the promoter of Tesla, a pioneering EV brand in the US market. What mattered was that supporting the EV industry would help the US achieve its objective of transitioning from fossil fuels to electric vehicles more quickly. Musk subsequently rode that momentum to become not only the wealthiest man in the world but also, according to some projections, a potential future trillionaire.
Similarly, during the Second World War, the US temporarily converted car factories into arms and ammunition manufacturing facilities to enable its military to prosecute the war successfully.
Nigeria is at war against poverty, so it must introduce revolutionary policies to triumph over it.
In the same vein, Innoson Motors, Nord and other established automobile assembly plants in Nigeria must be incentivised to include electric okadas and kekes in their production lines. The government should then procure these vehicles and lease them to rural dwellers, providing both employment and mobility for rural communities.
At the same time, the government must introduce a policy compelling its Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to procure only vehicles assembled in Nigeria, thereby ending the importation and use of foreign-brand cars by government officials, from the Presidency to local government councils.
The Lagos State Government, for instance, procures vehicles assembled locally by GAC in a plant jointly owned with the Chinese firm responsible for assembling that brand of car in Lagos, Nigeria.
Nigerians may be surprised to learn that South Africa’s automobile industry assembles Toyota and Mercedes-Benz vehicles for domestic use and export to markets such as the United States.
If we adopt the same approach in Nigeria, it would embody the spirit of “Let us produce what we consume and consume only what we produce,” much like the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) mantra championed by President Donald Trump in the United States.
Once we make that slogan our battle cry, it will be remarkable to see how rapidly local manufacturing can expand, thereby increasing manufacturing’s contribution from its current meagre share of about eight per cent of GDP to perhaps a quarter of the economy, as is the case in Indonesia, which was at a comparable stage of economic development with Nigeria around the time of their respective independence-era trajectories in the 1960s.
As we are all likely to agree, manufacturing is an employment magnet. Once there is a boom in that sector, fewer Nigerians will be unemployed. Through wages, salaries and other emoluments, far more Nigerians will join the workforce, and prosperity will spread at the microeconomic level, just as it is currently evident to a significant extent at the macroeconomic level.
As the new Afrobeats sensation Young Jonn noted in his chart-busting song titled Elumelu, with the lyrics, “I see the money coming,” I see no reason why long-suffering Nigerians should not see the money coming when our leaders become more diligent in implementing the policies proposed above, as President Tinubu appears to have done so far through the bold reforms he introduced upon assuming office on May 29, 2023.
Incidentally, not everyone is enamoured of President Tinubu’s giant strides, as evidenced by the robust macroeconomic indices highlighted earlier. Rather, his critics are focusing on the pain being felt by a critical mass of Nigerians who have been impoverished by the harsh but necessary reforms, whose gains are becoming manifest at the macroeconomic level.
Unfortunately, the positive outcomes are yet to trickle down to the microeconomic level. Hence, in this intervention, I have detailed the seven channels that Nigeria broke and that need to be fixed or restored to enable those at the bottom rung of society to obtain relief more quickly, so that they, too, can heave a sigh of relief, just as those benefiting at the macroeconomic level are already doing.
Be that as it may, many Nigerians remain unconvinced by President Tinubu’s bold reform initiatives. Among them is a former Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo.
At the Financial Times (FT) Africa Summit 2026 in London last Wednesday, October 22, Obasanjo was asked whether Tinubu deserved a second term. He answered no and gave three reasons:
- Naira devaluation made every Nigerian 300% poorer.
“We do not live in isolation. Overnight, you devalue currency by 300%. Naira went from N500 to N1,500 to a dollar. What that meant was every Nigerian is made poor by 300%. That made Nigeria become poverty capital of world. You cannot say to me that is good for Nigeria.”
- “What policies are you seeing through?”
When asked whether Tinubu needed a second term to complete his reforms, Obasanjo responded:
“What policies are you seeing through? You impoverish your people and you want to see impoverishment through? What are you seeing through?”
He added:
“For the economy, I don’t see anything getting better.”
- Subsidy is corruption, not economics.
On the removal of the petrol subsidy, Obasanjo said:
“What we call subsidy for petroleum products, a lot of it is corruption. If we pay attention to corruption and deal with corruption, then what will remain of subsidy will be very little.”
He also drew a comparison with Ghana, stating that President John Mahama took over when the cedi exchanged at 16 to the dollar and, within six months, strengthened it to 10 to the dollar. It was subsequently trading at 11.5 to the dollar. “You can see difference,” he said.
Coincidentally, SBM, an economic intelligence firm, also used the cost of preparing a pot of jollof rice as a real-world inflation tracker for Nigeria last week.
In its report titled The Pot Cools, but Not Everywhere, SBM revealed the following changes in the cost of preparing a pot of jollof rice:
- July 2016: N4,087 per pot, when the tracking began.
- September 2025: N24,749.
- June 2026: N29,578, the peak.
- September 2026: N26,178, representing an 11.5% decline, or a reduction of N3,400.
The cheapest and most expensive locations were identified as follows:
- Cheapest: Onitsha and Awka, at N21,350.
- Lagos Trade Fair/Balogun: N22,350, representing a 35.6% decline from N34,700—the largest drop in Nigeria.
- Most expensive: Port Harcourt, at N32,000, where the cost actually increased by 2.6% due to flooding.
SBM’s conclusion was that:
“A fall of 11.5% has restored some protein and some vegetables to some pots. It has not restored bulk buying, and it has not changed the household budget arithmetic.”
This may help explain why former President Obasanjo argued that Nigerians had become 300% poorer, a claim that he might consider supported by the jollof rice data published by SBM.
Clearly, although the former president’s observation about the hardship caused by the reforms is understandable, it fails to take into account the fact that President Tinubu’s reforms have helped improve Nigeria’s macroeconomic indicators. These indicators are now well documented and have even been acknowledged by opposition leaders. They point to Nigeria’s emergence from the economic doldrums associated with a failing economy towards a more viable one, increasingly viewed by international investors as a destination for foreign direct investment (FDI).
This is reflected in developments such as the return of Nigerian bonds to the JPMorgan emerging-market index, foreign reserves now exceeding $54 billion, and other positive economic indicators highlighted earlier.
There is a conventional wisdom that sometimes things have to get rough before they get better. That is instructive. And, as we would all agree, growth rarely comes without discomfort.
Joseph Fuller put it best when he posited that “the night is darkest just before the dawn.”
Right now, Nigeria’s socioeconomic development may be somewhere around the midnight stage.
On October 1, Independence Day, President Tinubu essentially stated that Nigerians had passed the darkest part of the night. I recommend that we hold him to his words.
In 1933, the United States was grappling with the Great Depression under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was after the very rough and difficult times Americans endured that their country, now widely regarded as the wealthiest in the world, also became the most powerful nation on earth—a position it has maintained ever since.
If President Obasanjo were as optimistic as I am, he might view the hardships Nigerians are currently experiencing as comparable to the pain Americans endured in the mid-1930s, before their country was transformed into the leader of the free world, economically and politically.
In conclusion, dear readers, I would like us to be guided by the words of wisdom of one of America’s foremost presidents, John F. Kennedy:
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis’. One brush stroke stands for danger; the other opportunity.”
Next week, I will elaborate further on the significance of Kennedy’s quotable quote and consider whether President Bola Tinubu can become Nigeria’s equivalent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the 32nd president of the United States, who led his country out of the Great Depression of the 1930s through a series of far-reaching reforms. These bear comparison with the bold reforms Tinubu has been introducing to restore hope among Nigerians since his administration began on May 29, 2023.
Magnus Onyibe is an entrepreneur, public policy analyst, author, democracy advocate and development strategist. He is an alumnus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA, a Commonwealth Institute scholar, and a former commissioner in the Delta State government. He sent this piece from Lagos.
