Obasanjo forced 86m Nigerians into poverty by burning up forex to prop up Naira, not Tinubu – Group

The Democratic Front (TDF) has accused former President Olusegun Obasanjo of hypocrisy after he alleged that President Bola Tinubu’s reforms pushed Nigerians into poverty.

In a statement by its Chairman, Mallam Danjuma Muhammad and Secretary, Chief Wale Adedayo, the group said comments made by the former President at the Financial Times Africa Summit 2026 in London were regrettable.

The statement read, “It is regrettable that the octogenarian former President failed to remember that his decision to waste the nation’s hard-earned foreign exchange in propping up the value of the naira at the expense of providing electricity and other infrastructure that should galvanise production and productivity, forced 86 million Nigerians into multi-dimensional poverty in the year 2007.

“We can still recall how former President Olusegun Obasanjo operated multiple windows of foreign exchange that encouraged arbitrage and emboldened round-tripping of subsidised dollars, which gradually depleted Nigeria’s huge foreign reserves and suffocated local production and productivity, at the cost of economic growth and development.

“In addition to Obasanjo’s monumental waste of foreign reserves in defending the Naira, the former President initiated the infamous auctioning of state-owned companies and enterprises, which drove many Nigerians out of jobs.

“It also increased the nation’s import bills by making local consumers more dependent on costly imported items, while depriving the State of the ability to adequately invest in electricity, agriculture, education, health, infrastructure, industrialisation, and other production-driven social interventions.

It is indeed sad and embarrassing that Former President Obasanjo, who presided over a stagnated economy that could not grow along with the country’s population, on account of his administration’s decision to subsidise both petroleum and the local currency in the exchange market, will mischievously accuse President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, whose policies have allowed the Naira to find its true value in the exchange market, of worsening poverty in Nigeria. In fact, Obasanjo’s own fiscal and monetary policy misnomer forced 86 million Nigerians into multi-dimensional poverty as at the time he left power in 2007.

“Therefore, we reject and debunk the former President’s claim of worsening poverty under Tinubu as false and misleading. In our view, the Naira was not devalued as falsely claimed by Obasanjo, but allowed to find its true value without economic implications for fiscal and monetary policies of the nation.

‘The former President should be reminded of how his policies on petrol and naira subsidy triggered avoidable poverty among Nigerians, a desperate situation which compelled him to create a largely unsuccessful public agency called the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) in 2001.

‘It is significant to note that seven years of NAPEP operations under the Olusegun Obasanjo administration did not achieve the progress recorded under three years of Tinubu’s initiatives on wage Increase, Pension Increase, payment of billions of pension backlogs, student loans, CREDICORP Consumer Loans, SMEDAN loans to Small and Medium Scale Businesses, and cash Transfers to vulnerable persons, in reducing multi-dimensional poverty in Nigeria.

“We call on Nigerians to disregard Obasanjo’s politically motivated tirades against Tinubu’s reform.”

The group argued that the former Nigerian leader made the anti-Tinubu insinuations to give undue advantage to his preferred presidential candidate in the forthcoming presidential election.