Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has delivered a stinging rebuke of the Bola Tinubu administration’s economic management, describing the current state of the Nigerian economy as organised hardship dressed up as reform, driven by policy confusion, weak leadership, and a dangerous disconnect from the daily suffering of ordinary citizens.
Atiku’s statement was issued in response to the latest warning from the International Monetary Fund, which cautioned that Nigerians could face increasingly difficult economic conditions in the near term as rising food and transportation costs continue to erode household incomes against a backdrop of persistent global shocks. The IMF also flagged Nigeria’s growing debt burden as a concern, even as the country’s crude oil grades fetched strong prices on the international market.
Atiku said the IMF’s assessment merely formalised what Nigerians already experienced every day. He argued that while senior government officials continued to speak in polished economic language, citizens were living a starkly different reality, with wages effectively eroded, food markets increasingly unaffordable, and daily survival reduced to a gamble. He lamented that rising global oil revenues had failed to translate into tangible relief for ordinary Nigerians, who remained crushed by food inflation, punishing transportation costs, a volatile exchange rate, and a depreciating currency.
He painted a grim picture of conditions at the grassroots level, noting that parents were withdrawing children from school because education had become a luxury, farmers were abandoning their land due to insecurity, graduates were roaming the streets without employment, and small businesses were collapsing under the weight of electricity tariffs, taxes, and an inhospitable commercial environment.
Atiku warned that the country was not merely experiencing an economic downturn but a full-scale erosion of human dignity, and that asking hungry people to exercise patience while policies continued to squeeze the life out of them was not reform but punishment. He expressed concern about the mounting debt burden, saying that Nigeria was borrowing heavily with nothing visible to show for it in terms of jobs, relief, or improvements in quality of life.
Calling for immediate action, he urged the federal government to abandon what he called trial-and-error economics and implement concrete, people-centred interventions to stabilise prices, revive small businesses, ease the cost of transportation, and protect the most vulnerable segments of the population. He stressed that the true test of leadership was whether citizens were better off, and argued that by that measure, Nigerians were far worse off today than before.
