Poverty existed before 2023 reforms — Budget Office DG
The Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Tanimu Yakubu, has rejected the suggestion that Nigeria’s persistent poverty and hardship are evidence that the economic reforms introduced by President Bola Tinubu’s administration have failed.
Yakubu argued that the country’s poverty crisis predates the reforms, warning against attributing long-standing structural weaknesses in the Nigerian economy to policies introduced since 2023.
He made the submission on Friday, in reaction to a July 16, 2026 report by The PUNCH, which highlighted widespread poverty and vulnerability in Nigeria despite the ongoing economic reforms.
In an article titled Poverty, Reform and the Problem of Causation, Yakubu said the report risked creating a false causal link between the reforms and the hardship Nigerians are experiencing.
“The pain is real; the conclusion does not follow automatically,” he said, arguing that Nigeria entered the reform period with “years of weak per-capita growth, low productivity, insecurity in food-producing regions, unreliable electricity, poor logistics, limited formal employment, inflationary financing, foreign-exchange scarcity, multiple exchange rates and fiscal leakage.”
According to him, the persistence of poverty does not by itself establish that the reforms caused or worsened it.
Yakubu also challenged the interpretation of a 79 per cent figure cited from the World Bank’s Streamlined Country Diagnostic, saying it should not be presented as a conventional poverty headcount.
He explained that the figure combines people living below the poverty line with those who are near-poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty following economic shocks.
