By Moshood Oshunfurewa, write from Lagos
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When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) declared last that Nigeria's economic reforms are "working," one could almost hear the ghost of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti chuckling in the background. For what does it mean for reforms to "work" when 63 percent of Nigerians, some 140 million souls - now wallow in poverty? What does it mean for an economy to be "strengthened" when more than 27 million of our countrymen face food insecurity? The IMF's own report, paradoxically, contains both the praise and the poison. "Strong reforms over the past three years have yielded improved macroeconomic outcomes," they say. Then, in the very next breath: "Still, conditions for many Nigerians remain difficult." Difficult? That is the understatement of the decade.
Let us interrogate this report with the rigour it deserves, not as cheerleaders of a failing orthodoxy, but as citizens whose stomachs rumble with hunger and whose pockets have been emptied by "reform."
The IMF tells us that poverty has ticked up to 63 percent. The World Bank, in its April 2026 Nigeria Development Update, confirmed this grim trajectory: poverty rose from 56 percent in 2023 to 61 percent in 2024, peaking at 63 percent in 2025. That is an additional 10 million Nigerians plunged into poverty in a single year, even as inflation supposedly "eased" from 34.80 percent in December 2024 to 15.15 percent in December 2025. But here is the cruel arithmetic: when prices have already tripled, a moderation in the rate of increase is not relief, it is merely a slower strangulation. As the World Bank itself admitted, "Household incomes have not grown fast enough to offset still-elevated inflation, and poverty has yet to begin declining."
Yet, in a country where official statistics have become instruments of political cosmetics, the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) once claimed poverty in Nigeria was less than stated IMF percent. Less percent! One wonders which Nigeria they surveyed. Certainly not in Nigeria where a bag of rice now costs more than a civil servant's monthly salary. Not Nigeria where ladies, mothers, and girl-children trade their dignity for a cup of garri. This is how shameful statistics in the hands of a desperate government manipulate data that ought to guide human capital development, business planning, and honest reflection of our realities.
Nigeria's economic destruction did not begin yesterday. Its foundations were laid during the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) of the Ibrahim Babangida military junta in 1986, a programme designed, prescribed, and supervised by the very IMF now praising our "resilience." From SAP to the present, the playbook has remained unchanged: remove subsidies, float the currency, privatise public assets, and watch the masses bear the cost while a tiny elite harvests the gains.
When President Bola Tinubu declared "the fuel subsidy is gone" on May 29, 2023, petrol prices surged by nearly 488 percent by October 2024. The naira, unified and free-floated, collapsed from about ₦465 to the dollar to nearly ₦1,465 by November 2024. For a country where 58 percent of households rely on petrol and diesel generators due to national grid failure, this was not reform, it was economic arson. The UN World Food Programme warned: "Never before have there been so many people in Nigeria without food." The "Hunger Protests" of August 2024, which security forces suppressed with bullets, killing at least 24 and arresting over a thousand, were the inevitable response of a people pushed to the wall.
The IMF acknowledges that "widespread insecurity from armed groups" is "another risk to people and economic activity," particularly in the north where most of our food is grown. But insecurity is not merely a risk, it is a direct consequence of poverty. When young men have no jobs, no hope, and no future, the gun becomes their employer. The reforms have deepened poverty, and poverty has deepened insecurity. This is not coincidence; it is causation.
And what of the Nigerian worker? In July 2024, after strikes and threats, the minimum wage was raised from ₦30,000 to ₦70,000 monthly. At today's exchange rate, that is roughly $42, less than what a domestic worker earns in a week in many African countries. But the tragedy runs deeper. The law exempts establishments with fewer than 25 employees, meaning millions in the informal sector, where most Nigerians toil, earn far less, or nothing at all. Seasonal agricultural workers, piece-rate labourers, and those on commission are explicitly excluded. The Nigeria Labour Congress and Trade Union Congress, speaking at May Day 2025, demanded not a minimum wage but a "living wage", a commitment President Tinubu made but has failed to honour.
Today, many Nigerian workers would soon be out of roof, not because of any failing of their own, but because their monthly earnings cannot afford rent. A civil servant earning ₦70,000 in a city like Lagos, where a single room in the suburbs costs ₦30,000 monthly, is left with ₦40,000 to feed a family, pay school fees, transport to work, and seek healthcare. It is arithmetic of impossibility. Their purchasing power has been so thoroughly eroded that basic needs, food, shelter, medicine, have become luxuries. The reforms are working, yes, for the landlord who hikes rent, for the supermarket owner who triples prices, for the banker who profits from currency speculation. But for the worker? The reform is a noose.
The IMF projects economic growth of 4.1 percent this year, up from 4 percent in 2025. The World Bank notes that growth has been "largely driven by services and industry, while agriculture, which employs more than half of the poor, has lagged behind." We were all taxed to death that is what it means! This is the crux of the matter: Nigeria is growing, but not developing. The GDP expands while the people purchasing power contract. Foreign exchange reserves rise while household reserves vanish. The fiscal deficit narrows while family deficits widen.
The IMF warns that higher costs of food, fertiliser, and fuel could "intensify inflationary pressures on poor households, potentially aggravating poverty and food insecurity." But these are not distant risks—they are present realities. Food inflation, though officially moderated to 10.84 percent by December 2025, had already peaked at 39.84 percent in December 2024. The damage was done. As the World Bank's Lead Economist for Nigeria, Fiseha Haile, admitted: "Inflation remains high… and it risks eroding real incomes and slowing poverty reduction." Yet the Bank's prescription remains more of the same: "sustained monetary discipline and structural reforms."
Reforms that Nigeria needs are not those that strengthen balance sheets while breaking backs. We need reforms that strengthen institutions, making them principled, accountable, and transparent. We need reforms that make economic power viable for the majority, not monopolised by a few private companies feasting on the carcass of public institutions. We need reforms that recognise that a nation's wealth is measured not in GDP figures but in the dignity of its people.
The IMF and World Bank will continue their praise. The government will continue its propaganda. But the Nigerian people know the truth. They feel it in their empty stomachs, in their unpaid salaries, in their children's untended illnesses. The reforms are working, for the tiny few. For the rest of us, they are working us to death.
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