Bwala: Tinubu’s reforms pushed more Nigerians into poverty, but progress made

Daniel Bwala, Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Policy Communication, has admitted that the administration’s economic reforms pushed more Nigerians into poverty.

Bwala, however, said the government had made significant progress since the reforms were introduced.

He spoke on Wednesday during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today.

“Please let it be clear even to the opposition, the reason why you have this number of poor people and some of these doomsday analytics that people are giving is because we undertook a reform,” he said.

“There is no part of the world where you start a reform like that there will not be discomfort.

“More people went down to poverty, acknowledged, but since when the reform started to today, we have made marked progress which is what we have spent the last three years talking to Nigerians about.

“So, you cannot discount that even though there are quite a number of our population that are poor which we admit, but we have made progress so far.”

On the 2027 presidential election, Bwala predicted that Tinubu would perform better than he did in the 2023 election.

Tinubu defeated Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, by 1.81 million votes in 2023, while he defeated Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) by 2.69 million votes.

Bwala said the president’s victory margin in 2027 would be significantly wider.

He said, “The margin of gap that President Bola Tinubu will give each and everyone of these candidates will be so much that you won’t believe it.”