It is easy, perhaps too easy, to spend every column cataloguing what is going wrong in this country. God knows there is enough material. The insecurity, the infrastructure deficit, and the cost of living that is still biting hard on ordinary families, none of that has disappeared. But part of honest political commentary, the kind that is worth reading, is also the ability to call it straight when a government does something right. And last Thursday at the Presidential Villa, the Tinubu administration did something right. President Bola Tinubu launched five World Bank-backed programmes worth a combined $3.05 billion, targeted 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, that 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 be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying the job is done. I am not saying that $3.05 billion automatically means $3.05 billion reaches the people who need it. Nigeria has a long and painful history of well-funded programmes that look transformative on paper and dissolve somewhere between Abuja and the ward level. We know that story. We have lived it. But I will not use the sins of past administrations as a reason to refuse to acknowledge a genuine effort when I see one, and what was unveiled on Thursday looks, at minimum, like a genuine effort. Consider the architecture of what is being proposed. The NG-CARES Additional Financing of $500 million builds on a parent programme 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 individuals, smallholder farmers, nano and micro enterprises and communities hit by the COVID-19 shock. That is not a negligible foundation to build on. The new financing deepens that reach, targeting the households still struggling to recover from economic dislocations of the last several years. The SOLID programme, at $300 million, is designed specifically to address the crisis of internally displaced persons, a population numbering in the millions across the northeast and northwest that has too often been treated as a footnote in national development policy when it deserves to be a headline. Rather than stopping at emergency food parcels, SOLID takes a long-term development approach: restoring livelihoods, rebuilding local infrastructure and promoting social cohesion between displaced communities and the towns hosting them. That is the right instinct, and it is 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 greatest long-term significance. HOPE-EDU alone is backed by $552 million and is designed to reach 30 million formal and non-formal school children by 2029, covering 65,000 public schools across all 36 states and the FCT. HOPE-PHC is pushing reforms in primary healthcare delivery, and Health Minister Professor Muhammad Ali Pate gave figures at the launch that, if accurate, represent real progress: more than 3,000 Primary Healthcare Centres revitalised, visits to those facilities rising from under 10 million per quarter to 45.5 million per quarter, over 78,000 frontline health workers trained. Mind you, these are government figures, and they will need independent verification before anyone declares victory. But the direction of travel is encouraging. The reason this matters so much is something I have argued on this page many times. Nigeria’s crisis is fundamentally a human capital crisis. We have land, we have oil, we have a young population that could be an economic engine if properly educated and kept healthy. What we have consistently failed to invest in is the person, the child in a broken school in Gusau, the mother delivering in a clinic with no 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. Not one of them did it by speeches alone. You either build the human being, generation by generation, or you keep recycling poverty under different names. This package is, at its core, a bet on building the human being. Which is why the ward-centric approach that Tinubu described in his address is worth noting. The stated goal is to a
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