Stability That The Poor Cannot Feel

When the Emir of Kano and former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Muhammadu Sanusi II, speaks on the economy, he is worth hearing. His intervention at the Oxford Global Think Tank Leadership Conference, recently, deserves particular attention because it came from a man who has supported much of the reform agenda of President Bola Tinubu.

Sanusi agreed that the country has been pulled back from the brink. Growth has risen from an average of 0.9 per cent under the previous administration to about 4.5 per cent, inflation has fallen from above 30 per cent to 14.6 per cent, and external reserves now stand at about $55 billion. Each of these, he said, “is progress,” and on the numbers he is right.

Yet Sanusi did not stop at applause. “At the end of the day, we’ve got to look at the human beings at the bottom of the pyramid,” he told the gathering. “What’s happening to human beings? What’s happening to education? What’s happening to healthcare?” He went further, conceding that the country “should have designed policies that would try to minimise those shocks,” and noting that this had not been done. Coming from one of the most consistent advocates of fuel subsidy removal and a market-determined exchange rate, that admission carries considerable weight. It is the kind of honest assessment the government should welcome rather than resent.

The evidence supports him. The World Bank reported in April that the national poverty rate rose to 63 per cent in 2025, even as inflation began to ease, and observed that the reforms had delivered stability without bringing relief to the poor. Gross domestic product grew by 4.43 per cent in the second quarter of this year, the fastest pace in five years, but economists have pointed out that manufacturing, the sector best placed to create mass employment, is growing at barely 1.5 per cent. When growth is driven largely by services and oil, the headline figure can rise while household incomes stand still.

That is the gap between the statistics and the market stall. A civil servant in Abuja or a trader in Onitsha does not live on a GDP figure or an inflation rate. He lives on what his salary can buy after rent, school fees, transport and electricity have taken their share. Lower inflation means prices are rising more slowly, not that they have fallen. For families whose incomes did not keep pace with the shocks of 2023 and 2024, the stabilisation the government now celebrates has arrived as a plateau of hardship from which they see no way down.

We have said on this page before that reform without a social cushion is a policy half done. When the government removed the petrol subsidy and floated the naira, it promised cash transfers and other palliatives to shield the most vulnerable. The results have been disappointing. A World Bank study last November found that only about 44 per cent of the benefits of Nigeria’s social protection programmes reached the poor, owing largely to poor targeting and fragmented delivery. A safety net that misses more than half of the people it was built to catch has failed at its one task.

Sanusi also raised an uncomfortable fiscal truth. Citing World Bank figures, he noted that debt service consumed about 124 per cent of federal revenue in the first half of this year. A government that spends more on creditors than it earns has little room left for the social spending that would soften the impact of reform. That is why the President’s fresh request to borrow $7.7 billion, now before the Senate, must be accompanied by a hard look at public spending, including the cost of governance, which remains bloated at a time when citizens are asked to make sacrifices.

His most pointed remark, however, concerned the attitude of the government to its critics. “It’s not every time people talk about poverty or talk about difficulty that they’re just enemies of the government,” he said. “That is not how to respond to economic distress.” This is a timely rebuke. Too often, officials have dismissed complaints about hunger as opposition propaganda, with the President himself recently blaming his rivals for the very problems they now criticise. That posture is unwise. A government that cannot hear the cries of its people cannot design the policies that will answer them.

The organised private sector has made a similar point. At the 32nd Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja last month, the new chairman of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, Omoboyede Olusanya, said progress should be judged by its effect on households, workers and businesses rather than mainly by GDP growth. He also asked that summit commitments carry clear timelines and measurable indicators. That is sound advice, and it should apply equally to the government’s own promises on poverty and jobs.

What, then, must be done? The federal government should overhaul the national social register so that cash transfers reach the people who need them, and publish regular audits of who has been paid. It should channel more of the savings from subsidy removal into primary healthcare and basic education, where the returns for the poor are greatest. It should also give priority to sectors that create jobs at scale, especially agriculture and manufacturing, by tackling the high cost of power and credit that keeps factories idle.

Sanusi also cautioned against complacency, describing current stability as a starting point rather than an achievement to be celebrated. The government would do well to take that advice in the spirit in which it was given. Macroeconomic stability is necessary, but it is not the goal of economic policy. The goal is a better life for the people.

An economy is not healed until the people who carried its pain begin to feel the cure.