By Sabiu Abdullahi
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has criticised President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms, arguing that the sharp depreciation of the naira has significantly reduced Nigerians’ purchasing power and worsened poverty.
Obasanjo made the remarks on Wednesday at the Financial Times Africa Summit 2026 in London, United Kingdom, where he faulted the administration’s decision to devalue the naira in 2023.
He argued that the currency’s decline had impoverished Nigerians, citing the movement of the exchange rate from about N500 to the dollar to N1,500.
The former president said, “We do not live in isolation as a country. We interact with the rest of the world. And overnight, you devalue the currency by 300 per cent. The naira went from N500 to a dollar to N1,500 to a dollar. What that meant was that every Nigerian is made poor by 300 per cent.”
Obasanjo said the situation had made Nigeria “the poverty capital of the world,” referring to the country’s large population of people living in poverty.
“You cannot say to me that that is good for Nigeria. You cannot say to me that that is good for us in any sense,” he noted.
He also questioned calls for the Tinubu administration to be given more time to implement its economic policies, saying he had yet to see meaningful improvement in the economy.
“For the economy, I don’t see anything getting better. What policies are you seeing through? You impoverish your people, and you want to see impoverishment through?” he remarked.
Obasanjo further maintained that the policies introduced by the administration were “not in the best interest of Nigerians,” adding, “Nobody can deny that.”
On petrol subsidy removal, the former president acknowledged the importance of fuel to economic activities but argued that corruption associated with the subsidy system should have been addressed first.
He said a country facing severe economic difficulties must “curb corruption, wastefulness and unnecessary luxury and produce.”
Figures cited in the report show that before the Central Bank of Nigeria unified the exchange-rate windows on June 14, 2023, the official naira-to-dollar rate stood at approximately N460.80. By October 19, the official rate had weakened to about N1,333.54, while the currency reached a low of approximately N1,607.05 in early May 2025.
Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that headline inflation fell to 14.63 per cent in September from 20.98 per cent a year earlier. Food inflation, however, stood at 19.59 per cent, while Nigeria’s real Gross Domestic Product grew by 4.43 per cent in the second quarter.
Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy Taiwo Oyedele said on August 19 that the removal of the petrol subsidy saved the government N15.8 trillion between June 2023 and December 2025.
Efforts to obtain the Presidency’s response to Obasanjo’s criticism were unsuccessful, as Bayo Onanuga, the President’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, could not be reached.
