Monday 13 April, 2026

The World Bank says the economy is growing. The same report says you're getting poorer. Both are true.

The World Bank published its April Africa Economic Update last week. Nigeria got a headline number: 4.1% growth forecast for 2026. And a warning buried underneath it.

The warning is the story.

Fiseha Haile, the Bank's Nigeria lead economist, stood in Abuja on April 7 and said this: "Inflation is still elevated and under increasing pressure, and that poses risks to incomes and poverty reduction."

He also said rising fuel costs from the Iran war are "squeezing incomes." He recommended that Nigeria lift restrictions on fuel imports to ease inflation. He said Nigeria's debt-to-GDP ratio fell for the first time in a decade. He said external buffers are improving.

All of this is true. And all of it is beside the point of what most Nigerians are living.

Here's what's driving the contradiction. Nigeria's GDP growth is driven by services: ICT, financial services, telecoms, real estate. These sectors are expanding. The people working in them, and the companies operating in them, are doing well by aggregate measure. That expansion is real. It shows up in the GDP number.

But agriculture and manufacturing are constrained by fuel costs, logistics costs, insecurity, and infrastructure gaps. These are the sectors where most Nigerians actually earn. When diesel is heading toward ₦2,000 and transport costs pass those prices on through every supply chain, the person on a ₦80,000 monthly salary feels it as inflation against a fixed income. The GDP number doesn't feel that. It just counts the services sector's expansion and calls it growth.

The 2025 budget missed its revenue target. The 2026 budget benchmarks crude at $64.85, while crude is trading above $100. Debt service alone is budgeted at ₦15.52 trillion. That's more than the entire health and education allocation combined.

What the World Bank actually offered Nigeria last week was a dual diagnosis: the macro stabilisation is working, and it's not enough. Those two things are allowed to coexist. The number going up and the life getting harder are not contradictions. They're a portrait of an economy whose gains are not reaching the people generating them.

The 4.1% will appear in government press releases for months. The "squeezing incomes" sentence probably won't.

Both came from the same report, filed the same day, in the same capital city.