Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has accused President Bola Tinubu of making every Nigerian poor by 300 per cent through the devaluation of the naira, saying the policy has turned Nigeria into “the poverty capital of the world.”
Obasanjo spoke on Wednesday at the Financial Times Africa Summit 2026 in London, United Kingdom.
He said the naira lost its value overnight due to economic reforms undertaken by the Tinubu administration in 2023.
The statesman argued, “We do not live in isolation as a country. We interact with the rest of the world. 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.”
Obasanjo said that had made Nigeria “the poverty capital of the world,” which he said meant the country had the largest number of poor people in the world.
“You cannot say to me that that is good for Nigeria. You cannot say to me that that is good for us in any sense,” he noted.
The former President also rejected the argument that Tinubu needed more time to complete his reforms, saying he did not see the economy improving.
“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?” he remarked.
Obasanjo said the programmes Tinubu had put in place were “not in the best interest of Nigerians,” adding, “Nobody can deny that.”
On the petrol subsidy, he said fuel affected “everybody and everything,” but argued that a lot of what Nigeria called subsidy was corruption and should be tackled first.
He said a country in a very bad economic situation must “curb corruption, wastefulness and unnecessary luxury and produce.”
Before the Central Bank of Nigeria unified the exchange-rate windows on June 14, 2023, the official exchange rate of the naira to the dollar stood at about N460.8 to the dollar.
The naira fell 36 per cent against the dollar on the official market as the official rate became about N1,333.54 on October 19. However, it had fallen to a low of about N1,607.05 in early May 2025.
In September, the National Bureau of Statistics said headline inflation stood at 14.63 per cent, down from 20.98 per cent a year earlier. However, food inflation stood at 19.59 per cent even as real GDP grew by 4.43 per cent in the second quarter.
The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, said on August 19 that subsidy removal saved N15.8trn between June 2023 and December 2025.
Efforts by our correspondent to get the reaction of the Presidency were unsuccessful, as the Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, was unreachable.