Why the hungriest season produces the greatest nations — by Oluwadare Ayeni

There is a lesson hidden in the way an ordinary Nigerian manages money, one so simple it embarrasses the economists, yet so profound it shames the politicians. If you have twenty thousand naira and you spend every kobo on food, you will eat well today. But tomorrow, the hunger returns, identical and merciless, and you are no better positioned than the day before. However, if you endure the discipline of spending half on durable clothing, you will wear that investment for months, perhaps years, long after the memory of that one hungry evening has faded. This is not merely folk wisdom. It is the operating philosophy of every nation that has ever pulled itself from poverty into prosperity. And it is the quiet, often misunderstood logic behind the most consequential decisions of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration in Nigeria.

For decades, Nigeria fed its citizens the political equivalent of a lavish daily meal, subsidised petrol that made fuel cheaper than water in some states, multiple exchange rates that created the illusion of a strong naira, and roads perpetually promised but perpetually unbuilt. The people ate well in the moment. Leaders were applauded. Elections were won. But every morning, the hunger returned. The subsidy bill swallowed over twelve trillion naira annually, money that disappeared into the fuel tanks of the wealthy, into the jerry cans of smugglers who carted Nigerian petrol across borders, and into the pockets of a cabal that had perfected the art of ghost vessels and phantom litres.

The parallel forex market turned the official exchange rate into a comfortable fiction, strangling genuine investors who could not access dollars at a rate that made business sense. And the roads remained what they had always been: a national shame that cut the country into economic islands, making a bag of tomatoes from Sokoto cost more in Lagos than imported goods arriving by sea from China. Nigeria was spending all twenty thousand naira on food. Every cycle. Every year. Every decade.

Then came the reckoning. On the day of his inauguration, May 29, 2023, President Tinubu announced the end of the fuel subsidy with words that would ignite both outrage and, with time, reluctant admiration: “Subsidy is gone.” Days later, the Central Bank of Nigeria unified the exchange rate, allowing the naira to find its true market value. And across the country, two extraordinary road projects were flagged off, the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway stretching over seven hundred kilometres along Nigeria’s southern flank, and the Badagry-Sokoto Expressway threading the nation from its southwestern edge to its far northern border. The immediate consequences were brutal. Petrol prices tripled. The naira fell steeply. Transport costs surged. Market prices climbed. Nigerians, already stretched thin, felt the full weight of a structural adjustment that spared no one. This was the hunger, real, sharp, and undeniable. But history, that most unsentimental of judges, has seen this moment before. It has watched nations absorb exactly this kind of pain and emerge, years later, unrecognisably transformed.

In the early 1960s, South Korea was poorer than Nigeria. Its GDP per capita was lower. Its infrastructure was devastated by war. Its people were hungry, not metaphorically, but literally. President Park Chung-hee made decisions that were deeply unpopular: he redirected state resources from consumption subsidies into massive industrial infrastructure, built the Gyeongbu Expressway connecting Seoul to Busan at enormous political cost, and forced the country through a painful export-oriented restructuring that crushed short-term comfort. The hunger was real. Protests filled the streets. Criticism was fierce and unrelenting. But today, South Korea is a top-fifteen global economy, home to Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, a nation that exports culture as confidently as it exports semiconductors. The expressway that was mocked as a vanity project when it opened in 1970 became the physical spine of the Korean economic miracle. They bought the clothes. They wore them for generations.

Rwanda offers perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this principle that the modern world has witnessed. In 1994, Rwanda lay in ruins, not just economically, but morally and spiritually. President Paul Kagame inherited a nation of mass graves and shattered institutions. He made choices that were extraordinarily unpopular: he imposed fiscal discipline so harsh that international donors balked, invested in digital infrastructure when his people still needed food, built roads through mountainous terrain at staggering cost, and pushed Kigali into a vision of clean streets, formal governance, and tourism-led growth that seemed almost delusional given the scale of the preceding catastrophe. Critics argued that his priorities were grotesquely misplaced, that Rwanda needed food aid and grief counselling, not fibre optic cables and five-star hotels. Today, Rwanda is one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies. Kigali is consistently ranked the cleanest and most business-friendly city on the continent. Foreign direct investment flows steadily inward. A nation that endured its hunger and invested in its clothing now dresses the rest of the continent in ambition and possibility.

When Deng Xiaoping launched China’s economic reforms in 1978, he told a population that had known only centrally subsidised existence that those subsidies were ending. State-owned enterprises, the fuel subsidies of the Chinese economy, would be restructured. Millions of workers lost guaranteed employment. Prices, previously controlled by the state, were liberalised. The exchange rate was reformed. The transition was so wrenching that it generated internal resistance at every level of the party and the state. “To get rich is glorious,” Deng declared, but the getting was painful before it was glorious. In the decades that followed, China lifted over eight hundred million people out of poverty, built the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and constructed infrastructure so vast and so consequential that it reshaped global trade. The initial hunger of reform became the greatest economic transformation in recorded human history. Ghana, too, walked this road in the early 1980s, when President Jerry Rawlings accepted a structural adjustment programme that was deeply painful, subsidies cut, currency devalued, public sector wages frozen. Ghanaians suffered openly and loudly. But the structural corrections that emerged from that suffering made Ghana’s institutions resilient enough that by the time oil was discovered in 2007, the country had the governance foundations to manage the windfall with relative stability, because the painful reforms had built them. Indonesia under Suharto made enormous infrastructure investments in the 1970s and 80s, roads, irrigation systems, rural electrification, that critics called wasteful in a country where millions still lacked clean water. But those roads connected Indonesian farmers to markets. That electrification powered Indonesian factories. The country that bought its clothes became Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

Now return to Nigeria, and to the specific architecture of Tinubu’s four major interventions, each of which follows the same structural logic. The removal of the fuel subsidy was the decision to stop spending the entire twenty thousand naira on food. The twelve-plus trillion naira annually consumed by the subsidy was not, in fact, feeding the poor. Analysis consistently showed that the wealthiest Nigerians, who own the most vehicles, consumed the most subsidised fuel. The poor man without a car was subsidising the fuel of the man who owns three. Ending the subsidy and redirecting those funds toward targeted social transfers, healthcare, and infrastructure is the precise structural logic of buying durable clothing instead of an expensive daily meal. The unification of the exchange rate was the decision to stop pretending the food was cheaper than it was. The multiple exchange rate system created a fiction, that the naira was stronger than the market believed, and that fiction made every serious foreign investor hesitate, because they could not trust the rate at which they would bring capital in or take it out. By unifying the rate and letting the naira find its real value, painful as that devaluation is, Nigeria becomes a market that investors can calculate with confidence. A transparent price, however uncomfortable, is the foundation of genuine commerce.

The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway is perhaps the most powerful piece of structural clothing in Nigerian history. A seven-hundred-kilometre corridor linking Lagos through Ogun, Ondo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, and Cross River states to Calabar does not merely connect cities, it opens an entire coastline to commerce. It creates a continuous spine for tourism, logistics, fishing, oil services, and manufacturing along a stretch of Nigeria that has remained economically fragmented for generations. When this road is complete, a journey that currently fractures economic activity across disconnected state economies will become a single flowing corridor of trade and investment. Like South Korea’s Gyeongbu Expressway, the returns will outlast every critic by fifty years. The Badagry-Sokoto Road is the article of clothing Nigeria has needed since the moment of independence. The inability to move goods efficiently between the agricultural north and the consuming south is one of the structural reasons food is so expensive in southern markets. Northern farmers watch produce rot because they cannot move it fast enough. Southern consumers pay inflated prices because supply chains are broken by terrible roads. A functioning expressway from Badagry to Sokoto does not merely move vehicles, it moves tomatoes, onions, grains, cattle, and manufactured goods across a corridor that currently haemorrhages economic value on a daily basis. When it is complete, it will reduce food prices, integrate national markets, and lay the physical foundation for the kind of structural agricultural transformation that powered East Asia’s industrial rise.

And yet history is also full of leaders who prescribed the bitter medicine and then stole the cure. The analogy only holds if the ten thousand naira saved from food is genuinely spent on clothing, not secreted into private accounts, not distributed as political patronage, not consumed by the procurement corruption that has swallowed so many Nigerian infrastructure budgets before these roads were ever conceived. Park Chung-hee’s Korea worked because the infrastructure was actually built. Rwanda works because its government, whatever its other contradictions, actually delivers measurable public services. China’s miracle happened because the redirected resources actually created productive capacity that reached ordinary people. Tinubu’s reforms will be vindicated or condemned by the same unforgiving standard: not the philosophy of the decision, but the integrity of its execution. Whether the subsidy savings were genuinely redirected to development. Whether the roads are being built to specification, on time, without being hollowed out by inflated contracts. Whether the exchange rate reforms are building the investor confidence they promised. These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that will determine whether Nigeria is writing the first chapter of its own Korean miracle, or merely the latest chapter in its long and painful catalogue of opportunities squandered at the moment of their greatest promise.

The hunger is real. Let no one minimise what ordinary Nigerians are enduring in this season of adjustment. The mother who cannot afford transport to the market, the student whose school fees have inflated beyond reach, the small trader whose cost of goods has doubled, their pain is not abstract. It is daily and it is heavy, and it demands acknowledgement before it demands argument. But the question history asks is never simply whether the reform hurt. The question history asks is whether the nation had the courage to endure the hurt, and the integrity to ensure it was not endured in vain. Every nation that is prosperous today passed through a season of structured pain. Every road that now carries commerce was once a muddy argument about misplaced priorities. Every exchange rate that now attracts investors was once a devaluation that made markets howl and citizens despair.

Nigeria has, for this brief and consequential moment, chosen to buy the clothes. Whether those clothes last for generations, whether the roads rise, the savings are reinvested, the exchange rate stability holds, and the structural foundation proves genuine, that is the work still ahead, unfinished and urgent. The hungry season has begun. What we make of the morning after is entirely up to us.

Oluwadare Ayeni, PhD