A Special Adviser to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Media and Policy Communication, Daniel Bwala, has attributed the slow impact of the administration’s economic reforms on ordinary Nigerians to the country’s large population and significant infrastructure deficit.
Speaking during an interview on ARISE News on Tuesday, Bwala said the federal government’s available resources, despite increased revenue generation, remain inadequate to address the needs of more than 230 million Nigerians and close longstanding infrastructure gaps.
According to him, the scale of Nigeria’s population means that the benefits of ongoing reforms will take time to be fully felt by citizens.
“The answer is simply population and resources. The population is over 230 million. The resources we have, however—even with the increased revenue—are not enough to match the population and the deficit in terms of infrastructure. So, growth will inevitably be slow, but it will be slow, steady, and consistent,” he said.
Bwala argued that the effects of the government’s economic policies are already visible through increased allocations to state governments, which he said have improved governance and development projects across the country.
“When you talk about the increased revenue, the effect of that increased revenue is the higher allocation to states, which has resulted in state administration improvements and has also impacted the people,” he stated.
The presidential aide declined to engage in comparisons among states but maintained that federal government reforms have produced measurable outcomes nationwide.
“I am actually not here to start talking about state versus state because it would take away from my job description, which is to talk about what the federal government is doing, the concomitant effect of which is seen in the states,” he said.
Highlighting some of the administration’s interventions, Bwala pointed to the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), the Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) transportation programme, and healthcare initiatives such as subsidies for dialysis and Caesarean section procedures.
He said the programmes were specifically designed to support low-income Nigerians.
“When we talk about over one million beneficiaries of the Student Loan Fund (NELFUND), these are not children of the rich; these are children of the poor. Without the intervention in this regard, they may not have had the opportunity to achieve their dreams,” he said.
He added that the CNG initiative and healthcare subsidies were also targeted at vulnerable citizens.
“Every policy introduced by this government has the poor as its direct beneficiaries,” Bwala maintained.
On poverty reduction, the presidential adviser said the success of government policies should be measured using empirical data rather than public perception alone, acknowledging that macroeconomic improvements often take time to translate into better household living conditions.
“The argument most people make is that the administration appears to be too focused on macroeconomic indicators… They are not focused enough on household economics. I think that it is the argument—so you are celebrating numbers while citizens are counting their losses. That’s a fact,” he said.
Nevertheless, Bwala insisted that the administration remains constrained by limited resources and the country’s growing population, arguing that these factors continue to slow the pace of poverty reduction despite ongoing reforms.
