Recently, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) published the results of the General Household Survey Panel, which showed that 63.8 percent of households face severe food insecurity and are skipping meals, some for a whole day. Nigeria is not in war or ravaged by famine, so why should two-thirds of the population be in the throes of hunger and starvation? How can one explain the savagery of hunger that has reduced many Nigerians to scavenging for food? Well, here’s the harsh truth: the Nigerian state is starving the Nigerian people through deliberate policy choices.
Bola Tinubu, the president whose badly thought-out policies have inflicted pains on ordinary Nigerians, recently admitted that “there is hunger” in Nigeria. But Tinubu had nothing more to say beyond the usual platitude: “There is hope.” Elsewhere, governments would roll out urgent practical measures, not pie-in-the-sky promises, to tackle the problem. Here in Nigeria, the government has done nothing meaningful to alleviate the untold sufferings that its own policies have caused the people.
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Lest we forget. Tinubu’s decision to float the naira and remove the fuel subsidy, whatever their merits, are the proximate causes of the debilitating cost-of-living crisis now gripping Nigeria. The scrapping of the currency peg led to over 70 percent devaluation of the naira and to imported inflation, while the withdrawal of the fuel subsidy caused the tripling of the pump price of petrol, creating adverse knock-on effects. Even the IMF, which supported the policies, recently said that there should be “appropriate design and sequencing” of such reforms, “with the costs and benefits of multiple reforms appropriately spaced through time, so as not to overburden populations.” The IMF also said that “there should be complementary and compensatory measures to mitigate potential social costs.”
Of course, Tinubu’s painful reforms do not include any of those safeguards. They were not appropriately designed and sequenced—naira’s floating, fuel subsidy removal, and electricity subsidy withdrawal were all done almost in parallel. And there have been no complementary and compensatory measures to mitigate their social costs. Recently, Wale Edun, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, said that Nigeria saved $20 billion by removing the fuel subsidy and floating the naira. Great, but what have the savings been spent on? Is the collapse of business activity, due to high inflation, high interest rates, and the naira’s steep devaluation, which has significantly raised input costs, the right price to pay for the government’s exchange-rate and monetary policies? Is the fact that 64 percent of households are going hungry, due to poverty and the skyrocketing costs of foods, the right price to pay for the withdrawal of the fuel and electricity subsidies? Where is the safety net for the needy?
Social protection is a badge of a healthy society. South Africa proves this by having one of the most generous social safety nets in the world. According to a survey by the Economist magazine, a basic welfare state has raised millions out of indigence in South Africa. Spending on welfare grants rose from about 2 percent of GDP in 1999 to almost 4 percent in 2024; today, 47 percent of the population receives a grant, up from about 6 percent in 1999. Furthermore, 89 percent of South Africans live in formal housing, and 95 percent enjoy electricity, while the share of households without access to piped water fell from 20 percent in 1996 to 9 percent in 2022.
“They were not appropriately designed and sequenced—naira’s floating, fuel subsidy removal, and electricity subsidy withdrawal were all done almost in parallel.”
The above statistics shame Nigeria, which calls itself the Giant of Africa. Indeed, it is a big-for-nothing giant, with no safety net for its citizens, most of whom lack proper housing and have no access to electricity and clean water. According to official figures, 63 percent of Nigerians, or 133 million, were multidimensionally poor in 2022; now, 64 percent cannot afford enough food to eat. It is interesting to note that the figure was 36.9 percent in 2019. So, government policies doubled the rate of hunger in five years. But most of that increase has happened under Tinubu, whose policies have increased food inflation, now 39.16 percent, and left most Nigerians with no disposable income and, thus, no spending power.
The American economist Arthur Okun came up with the “misery index” as a measure of people’s economic distress. The index is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates. The higher the index, the greater the misery. Of course, Nigeria’s misery stems from worsening unemployment and inflation. Headline inflation is currently 33.88 percent, while unemployment is nearly 40 percent. Did I say nearly 40 percent? Yes, I did, and decidedly so! Forget the dodgy jobs data that the NBS has produced since it perversely changed the definition of unemployment in 2023, which resulted in the unemployment rate magically dropping from 33.4 percent to 4.1 percent, now reportedly 4.3 percent.
Given that a low unemployment rate is a sign of a strong economy and a sign of better living standards, why is it that Nigeria’s economy is so weak, and poverty is so rife, despite the unemployment rate supposedly being as low as 4.3 percent? Is the NBS saying that, with a supposed unemployment rate of 4.3 percent, Nigeria’s economy is as strong as that of the UK with a 4.3 percent unemployment rate or that of the US with a 4.1 percent unemployment rate in 2024? Only the utterly deluded will say such a thing!
As the Financial Times rightly said in a recent editorial, “bad jobs data leads to bad decisions.” That’s precisely why Nigerians must ignore the NBS’s jobs data, for it is wholly useless. Similarly, Nigerians must ignore the so-called GDP growth rate, reportedly now 3.46 percent, because it is a “paper growth” that doesn’t create jobs or reduce poverty in Nigeria. Indeed, it insults the intelligence that Tinubu trumpets such a jobless “growth.”
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Basic economics says that the demand for labour is derived from the demand for goods and services. If the demand for goods and services is high, businesses will expand and create jobs. Sadly, Nigeria is in a vicious cycle. Most of the citizens are so poor that they can’t buy goods and services. The resulting weak demand, which has led to large inventories of unsold goods, means that businesses can’t expand and can’t hire people. One demand-side solution is a social safety net that puts money in the pockets of the poor, but that doesn’t exist in Nigeria. Another is to raise the minimum wage, but the new monthly minimum wage of N70,000 has been wiped out by inflation. According to SBM Intelligence, the market intelligence consulting firm, the average Nigerian spends roughly 97 percent of their income on food.
Inevitably, the focus must then shift to agriculture. But while agriculture accounts for 40 percent of jobs in Nigeria, and small farmers produce 90 percent of foods, the truth is that farming in Nigeria is bedevilled by weaknesses in the three critical areas—cultivation, mechanisation, and fertilisation—that have boosted agricultural produce worldwide, not to mention other chronic challenges around access to finance, climate change, and insecurity.
But no civilised nation can let hunger ravage its citizens. Nigeria must do two things urgently. First, it must establish a genuine social safety net. Second, it must remove all restrictions on food imports. Tinubu promised duty-free food imports but seems to have reneged. Yet, Nigeria can’t ban food imports amid widespread hunger. The truth is, from inflation-inducing devaluations and subsidy removals to lack of safety nets and food import bans, deliberate policy choices drive hunger and starvation in Nigeria. It’s outrageous!
