The President of ANAP Foundation and Founder of IBTC Bank, Mr. Atedo Peterside, has said Nigeria’s current economic reforms are widening inequality, making the rich richer while the poor get poorer.
Peterside stated this during an interview on Arise News, where he spoke on the state of the economy and the rising poverty level in the country.
According to him, the answer to whether the reforms are working depends entirely on who is asked.
“If you’re upper middle class, I can probably show on the blackboard and you have investments in the stock exchange and all that stuff, I can show on the blackboard that you’re probably better off in the last three years,” he said.
“If you’re a worker, low income worker, somebody like that without much savings and struggling to meet what 100 million Nigerians have to do to eat two meals a day and struggling to pay your bills, I can show you that you’re a lot worse off.”
He said the reforms have created two different realities for Nigerians.
“So what I’m saying is that when you say are the reforms working, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. So if you ask a rich man, he’ll tell you he’s working because he’s getting richer. But if you ask a very rich man, he’ll tell you the reforms are fantastic,” he said.
Peterside disclosed that personally, his own investments have grown since the reforms began, but insisted that should not be the yardstick for measuring success.
“I’m not going to lie. In terms of my investments and so on, income is getting higher. But that’s not my concern. My concern is for the 140, 130 million Nigerians who are poor, who are getting poorer,” he said.
To illustrate his point, the economist presented slides on poverty data, using a 50 per cent pass mark analogy from his primary school days. States with poverty rates below 50 per cent were deemed to have passed, while those above failed.
“The first one, if you can see, you know, Charles, when I was in primary school, the pass mark was 50%. If you got above 50%, you passed. If you got below 50%, you failed,” he explained.
“That first slide shows states in Nigeria where the poverty rate is below 50%. So you can see that they passed. So at best, less than one in two people are poor. And as you can see, it’s basically some 12 states plus FCT.”
Peterside noted a clear zonal pattern in the data. Most of the states that passed the 50 per cent mark are concentrated in the Southwest, with Anambra, Edo and Delta also featuring from the Southeast and South-South.
“You won’t see a single state there from the Northwest. You won’t see a single state from the Northeast. So what I’m about to let you know is that this poverty problem is not just national. You also have to break it down to parts of the country,” he said.
“And that’s why somebody can be screaming where he is, there’s little poverty. You tell you the reforms are working. The other person, where he is, everybody’s starving. And he’s asking you, are you crazy? Which reforms are working?”
The second and third slides, he said, contained the states that failed — all seven states in the Northwest, all six states in the Northeast, four from the North-Central and four from the South-South.
“High poverty in Nigeria is largely a zonal problem. It is a problem of the Northwest, of the Northeast, of the North-Central, and of the South-South,” he said.
He argued that the location and lived experience of policymakers has affected their perception of the economy.
“Now, when you have a president from the Southwest, and people surrounding him from his area, they will tell you that the reforms are working. They don’t have 80% of their people in their village screaming at them, telling them they cannot eat three meals a day.”
“Interestingly also, if all you do is to fly from Abuja, which is in group one, pass mark, and you come to Lagos, or the Southwest, and you go back to Abuja, in those two places generally, poverty is above pass mark. And it’s not apparent. So it’s possible even that some of the policy makers, they’re wearing blinkers, because they don’t go to the Northeast, or the South-South every day,” Peterside added.
On what is missing, Peterside said the government failed to provide cushions for the vulnerable.
“The government carried out all these reforms, but never put in place adequate safety nets for the very poor,” he said.