Nigeria’s reforms yielding fruit but impact yet to improve livelihoods"

Nigeria is forging ahead in stabilising its economy through several reforms, but the push has yet to translate into a favourable impact on the livelihoods of millions of its citizens, the World Bank’s Nigeria Development Update issued on Wednesday stated.

“The Nigerian government has taken bold steps to stabilise the economy, and these efforts are beginning to yield results,” Mathew Verghis, the organisation’s country director for Nigeria, remarked in the document.

“But macroeconomic stability alone is not enough. The true measure of success will be how these reforms improve the daily lives of Nigerians, especially the poor and vulnerable,” he affirmed.

The report highlighted the success recorded so far in economic growth, revenue mobilisation, monetary policy, and external balances, but drew attention to the harm that inflation and poverty has done to standard of living in Africa’s most populous nation, where cost-of-living crisis is currently rife.

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Food insecurity remains widespread, it said, with poor households, who spend a large part of their income on food, worst hit by surging price levels, adding that the cost of a basic food basket soared fivefold between in the five years to 2024.

It credited the 3.9 per cent annual GDP growth recorded in the first half of the year to improvement in the services and non-oil industries sectors of the economy during the period, supported by a moderate growth in agriculture and oil output.

The Washington-based organisation’s positive view of Nigeria’s external position mirrors the recent milestone recorded in the management of the country’s foreign reserves, which hit a six-year high last month on the back of higher non-oil exports and a slide in oil imports.

It is betting that public debt will decline for the first time in more than a decade from 42.9 to 39.8 per cent of GDP and that the federal fiscal deficit will remain broadly stable at 2.6 per cent of GDP this year.

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President Bola Tinubu’s administration has been widely praised for implementing difficult but long-overdue reforms, including fuel subsidy removal, exchange rate unification, and measures to plug fiscal leakages.

The policies have drawn commendation from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the World Trade Organization Director-General, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who said the reforms were necessary to restore confidence and attract investment.

Nevertheless, these measures have prompted food and transport prices to jump steeply across the country. There have been repeated calls for more targeted interventions to cushion the impact on low-income families.

The report called for urgent steps in tackling food inflation through the removal of trade barriers, urged improvement in public finance management through greater fiscal transparency and recommended expansion and institutionalisation of social protection schemes.