Nigeria’s Tinubu Defends Economic Reforms Blamed for Hardship
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu defended sweeping economic reforms implemented since he took power in May 2023 as necessary to prevent a national crisis.
“We were spending our future, we were spending our generation’s fortune,” he told a rare media briefing in Lagos, the commercial capital, on Monday. “Why should you have expenditure that you do not have revenues for?”
The leader of Africa’s most populous nation has undertaken a number of measures, including devaluing the naira, abolishing a complex multiple exchange-rate system and scrapping costly gasoline subsidies since taking office.
Tinubu said that Nigeria had been playing “Father Christmas” to its neighbors by subsidizing gasoline. “I do not have any regrets whatsoever in removing the subsidies,” he said.
While the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have welcomed the reforms, they has triggered soaring inflation and led to a cost-of-living crisis, worsening the plight of millions of Nigerians who live below the poverty line.
In August, demonstrators took to the streets in frustration over the tough living conditions in protests that were met by deadly force by police.
