It is easy, maybe too easy, to spend every column cataloguing what is going wrong in this country. God knows there is material enough. The insecurity, the infrastructure deficit, the cost of living that still bites hard on ordinary families, none of that has gone away. But some of honest political commentary— the kind you want to read— is also the ability to call it straight when a government does something right. And last Thursday, the Tinubu administration did something right at the Presidential Villa.
President Bola Tinubu on Thursday rolled out five World Bank-backed programmes worth a total of $3.05 billion, aimed squarely at poverty reduction, human capital development and community resilience. The programmes, NG-CARES Additional Financing, the SOLID programme for internally displaced persons and their host communities, and three HOPE initiatives covering governance, primary healthcare and basic education represent the single largest coordinated social investment package this administration has put on the table since taking office by any fair measure, and deserves serious attention and not the dismissive cynicism that has become the default posture of too many commentators when this government does anything.
Let me make it clear, this is not what I am saying. I’m not saying the job is done. “I am not saying that $3.05 billion automatically means $3.05 billion to the people who need it.” Nigeria has a long and painful history of well-funded programmes that look transformative on paper and then dissolve somewhere between Abuja and the ward level. We know that tale. We have gone through it. But I will not use the sins of past administrations as an excuse to refuse to acknowledge a genuine effort when I see one, and what was unveiled on Thursday looks, at minimum, like a genuine effort.
Think about the architecture of what’s being proposed. The NG-CARES Additional Financing of $500 million builds on a parent program that, according to the Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, already reached 17.6 million direct beneficiaries between 2021 and 2025, covering poor and vulnerable people, smallholder farmers, nano and micro enterprises and communities hit by the COVID-19 shock. That’s not a small base to build from. The new financing extends that reach to the households still trying to recover from the economic dislocations of the last several years.
The $300 million SOLID programme is specifically designed to address the crisis of internally displaced persons, a population that numbers in the millions across the northeast and northwest, and that has too often been treated as a footnote in national development policy when it deserves to be a headline. SOLID does not limit itself to emergency food parcels, but has a long-term development approach: restoring livelihoods, rebuilding local infrastructure and fostering social cohesion between displaced communities and the towns hosting them. That’s the right instinct and it’s long overdue.
But it is the $1.5 billion HOPE programme that I want to spend most time on, because it is the most consequential piece of this package and the one with the longest term significance. HOPE-EDU alone is backed by $552 million in funding and is expected to reach 30 million formal and non-formal school children by 2029 across 65,000 public schools in all the 36 states and the FCT. HOPE-PHC is leading reforms in primary healthcare delivery and Health Minister Professor Muhammad Ali Pate announced figures at the launch that, if true, are real progress: more than 3,000 Primary Healthcare Centres revitalised, visits to those centres rising from less than 10 million per quarter to 45.5 million per quarter, and more than 78,000 frontline health workers trained. That’s government figures. They will need independent verification before anyone can declare victory. But the direction of travel is to the positive.
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And this is why it matters so much, an argument I have made many times on this page. Nigeria’s crisis is a human capital crisis, plain and simple. We have land, we have oil, we have a young population that can be an economic engine if properly educated and kept healthy. We have consistently failed to invest in the person, the child in a broken school in Gusau, the mother delivering in a clinic without running water in Yobe, the young man in Abeokuta with skills and ambition but no access to credit or training. Every serious country that has broken the cycle of poverty in the last fifty years—South Korea, Malaysia, Rwanda, in more recent memory—did it by making massive, sustained investments in education and health. None of them did it by speeches alone. You build the human being, generation by generation, or you continue recycling poverty under different names. At its heart, this package is a bet on building the human being.
That is why it is worth noting the ward-centric approach that Tinubu described in his address. The stated goal is to align federal, state and local government delivery around a single accountability framework that reaches every ward. In theory, that’s just what Nigeria needs. The collapse of accountability at the last mile was not a lack of money at the federal level, it was the failure of so many past social programmes. If HOPE-GOV can actually improve service delivery and transparency at the ward level, it would address one of the oldest and most stubborn problems in Nigerian public administration.
Of course, the test of whether it does will define the legacy of this programme.
I also want to recognize the role of the World Bank here, not because the World Bank is above criticism, it is not, but because the institution’s willingness to commit $3.05 billion to Nigeria at this moment is itself a signal. This is not the kind of investment that multilateral institutions make in countries considered ungovernable, or fiscally reckless. It is no small thing that the Bank’s Country Director, Matthew Burges, stood at that podium and praised the commitment of this administration. It gives you some idea of how the economic reform programme is now being understood internationally, even as ordinary Nigerians are still feeling the pinch at home.
That gap between the macroeconomic recovery story and the experience of most Nigerians is the biggest challenge this government faces. President Tinubu mentioned real GDP growth of 11.2 per cent and foreign reserves exceeding $50 billion. Those are large numbers. But the question that concerns the woman selling tomatoes in Kano market or the civil servant in Enugu struggling to make a salary that has not kept pace with inflation go further is: when does this recovery come to me? Essentially these programmes are an attempt to answer that question. Cash transfers are already going to 15 million vulnerable households, health centres are being revitalized, schools are being attended to after years of neglect. They are the transmission mechanisms from macroeconomic policy to human reality.
Governors and the National Assembly have a critical role to play. Senate President Godswill Akpabio was right when he said that appropriations must produce measurable outcomes and that oversight must strengthen implementation not just scrutinise it. That’s the mandate. But if state governments see these funds as another avenue for diversion, if local government structures remain captured by governors rather than serving communities, if the accountability mechanisms at the ward level are window-dressing, then this $3.05 billion will join the long library of Nigerian programmes that looked good at the launch and faded by the second year. That will not happen.
For the moment, what I will say is this: The vision articulated on Thursday is the right vision. To reduce poverty through complementary investments in health, education, livelihoods and support to displaced persons is a coherent, integrated strategy, not a programme made up of disconnected expenditure lines. $3.05 billion is real money.
The World Bank does not lend its name and its capital to governments that are not demonstrating credibility of reform. Ultimately, it will be the execution that dictates whether this is a real turning point or just another entry in the long list of Nigerian programmes that started well and delivered poorly. But Nigerians should be aware of it. They should see it. They should demand quarterly reports from each implementing agency, hold each participating governor accountable for how the funds are spent in their state, and refuse to accept the usual vague reassurances when the time for reckoning arrives.
