At the Financial Times Africa Summit in London on Wednesday, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo said the naira devaluation under President Bola Tinubu had made every Nigerian poorer by 300 percent. It also turned the country, he said, into “the poverty capital of the world.”
The number behind the anger
Within three months in 2023, Tinubu’s government removed the fuel subsidy and let the currency trade more freely. The naira went from an average of about 500 to the dollar to about 1,500. “We do not live in isolation as a country,” Obasanjo said in a keynote interview. “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.”
“That made Nigeria become the poverty capital of the world, which means Nigeria has the largest number of poor people in the world,” he said. “You cannot say to me that that is good for Nigeria.” Asked whether Tinubu simply needs more time, he refused the premise. “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?”
Tinubu’s government defends the changes, pointing to the high cost of the subsidy and the distortions from multiple exchange-rate windows. At his three-year mark in May 2026, the president said his administration had chosen “long-term national recovery over short-term comfort,” while conceding the hardship it caused.
What the figures say
Before the Central Bank unified the exchange-rate windows on June 14, 2023, the official rate stood near 460.8 to the dollar. On October 19 it was about 1,333.54, after a low of around 1,607.05 in early May 2025. Headline inflation eased to 14.63 percent in September from 20.98 percent a year earlier, but food inflation remains at 19.59 percent. Real GDP grew 4.43 percent in the second quarter. Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele said on August 19 that removing the subsidy saved 15.8 trillion naira between June 2023 and December 2025. The Presidency did not respond: Bayo Onanuga, the president’s adviser on information and strategy, could not be reached.
A 2025 study by Adedeji D Gbadebo of Walter Sisulu University found the devaluation had largely failed to lift exports. In his words, “the limited diversification of Nigeria’s export base, coupled with ongoing oil production constraints and global price volatility, has curtailed any potential gains from a weaker currency.”
Corruption, Shell and Niger
On fuel, Obasanjo said the subsidy was never the real problem, because most of it was corruption. “If you are in a very bad economic situation, you must curb corruption,” he said, “and not spend money like a drunken sailor.” He recalled his own government’s failed talks with Shell, which turned down an offer to take over Nigeria’s refineries. Beyond their small size and poor upkeep, he said, Shell cited corruption networks in the industry. He also criticized Abuja’s August 2023 decision to cut power to Niger, which he said had relied on Nigeria after agreeing not to develop its own generation on the River Niger.
Still at work
Obasanjo, who is in his eighties, is the African Union’s High Representative for peace in the Horn of Africa. He spent two years on the Pretoria Agreement that ended Ethiopia’s 2020 to 2022 war, and he said it was clear to the mediators that both sides had given up on implementation. “An agreement is not worth the paper it’s written on,” he said, “unless you implement it.” On the Ebola outbreak that has reached Nigeria, he was upbeat: “We can do it again, unless something has gone horribly wrong.” Asked about retirement, he answered, “I’m not tired.”
Sources
- Olusegun Obasanjo
- Naira devaluation made Nigeria poor, Obasanjo says – New African Magazine
- You impoverished Nigerians, Obasanjo attacks Tinubu’s reforms
Photo: José Cruz/ABr (CC BY 3.0 br)
