Atedo Peterside, founder of Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc and Anap Foundation, has criticised President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms, saying they have improved the financial fortunes of wealthy Nigerians while worsening living conditions for millions of low-income earners.
Speaking in an interview with Arise TV on Monday, Peterside said wealthy Nigerians had recorded improvements in their investments and incomes over the past three years, while poorer households continued to struggle to afford basic necessities.
He argued that the reforms had not adequately addressed the economic difficulties facing the majority of Nigerians.
“If you’re upper middle class, I can probably show on the blackboard investments in the stock exchange and all that stuff,” he said.
“I can show on the blackboard that you’re probably better off in the last three years. If you’re a low income worker, like somebody without much savings and struggling to eat —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.”
Peterside said the government failed to establish adequate social safety nets for vulnerable Nigerians while implementing the reforms.
Citing 2025 data from TheCable Index, he pointed to significant regional disparities in poverty levels, saying poverty was concentrated in the North-West, North-East, North-Central and South-South.
He said only about 12 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) had poverty rates below 50 per cent.
According to Peterside, most of the states below that threshold were in the South-West, alongside Anambra in the South-East and Edo and Delta in the South-South.
He said the regional differences could shape how Nigerians assess the impact of the government’s economic policies, adding that policymakers might not fully understand the scale of poverty in some communities because they rarely visit affected areas.
“High poverty in Nigeria is largely a zonal problem. It is a problem of the north-west, of the north-east, of the north-central, and of the south-south,” he said.
Peterside maintained that the failure to provide adequate social safety nets for poor Nigerians remained a major gap in the implementation of the reforms.
