A President Discovers History
There is a particular genre of political statement that requires no fact-checking because it is, strictly speaking, true, and that is precisely what makes it so devastating. President Bola Tinubu has now supplied Nigeria with a fresh specimen. Addressing the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria, and apparently sensing that the room needed reassurance rather than results, the President offered the following: hunger existed before he was born, and he has no control over the country’s population growth. He went further, urging the bishops to let their churches “give you hope,” a piece of pastoral outsourcing that manages to be both theologically confused and administratively convenient.
Nobody disputes the premise. Hunger did, in fact, predate Bola Tinubu, in the same sense that gravity predated Isaac Newton. The trouble is what the premise is being asked to do. It is not offered as background. It is offered as an alibi, the rhetorical equivalent of a defendant telling the court that crime existed before he was born, and therefore he cannot reasonably be expected to account for the burglary. The doctrine of necessity has been stretched to cover many things in Nigerian constitutional history; this may be the first time it has been invoked to cover a grocery bill.
The Numbers Keep Their Own Counsel
The difficulty with “I inherited this” as a governing philosophy is that inheritance has a clock on it. Three years into an administration is not the same as three weeks, and the figures assembled by critics, Peter Obi citing acute food insecurity roughly doubling to 35 million and extreme poverty approaching 140 million since 2023, and Atiku’s aide Paul Ibe pointing to World Bank data showing the poverty count climbing from around 115 million at handover to an estimated 140 to 141 million now, do not particularly care whose watch they fall on. Numbers are notoriously indifferent to the doctrine of inherited liability.
What makes the “I have no control over the population” line especially interesting is that it is offered as a natural fact, in the manner of rainfall or the tides, when it is in fact a policy choice, or rather, the absence of one. Governments that decided population growth was a governable variable rather than a weather pattern built entire development strategies around female secondary education, contraceptive access, and urbanisation, and watched their fertility rates and their GDP per capita move in the predicted directions. Singapore did not have a lower birth rate handed to it by providence. It legislated, educated, and planned its way there, and its GDP per capita rose from parity with 1965 Mexico to parity with 1990s Germany inside a single working lifetime. Nigeria’s population, meanwhile, is being narrated to the electorate as an act of God, one that, coincidentally, no minister is required to answer for.
Why the World Is Watching, and Not Kindly
This is the part of the essay where the sardonic Nigerian commentator is supposed to blame the West and move on. It would be more honest to say the two problems are feeding each other. When a sitting head of state tells his own bishops that the state’s core function, keeping people fed, is beyond the state’s remit, he is not merely making a domestic communications error. He is handing a gift-wrapped argument to every foreign leader already inclined to write Africa off as a continent of ungovernable multiplication.
Emmanuel Macron’s infamous remark about African birth rates was crude and widely, rightly condemned. But crude framing does not require an accurate premise to be politically useful, and Tinubu’s own words now do more to validate that framing than any Élysée press conference could. The Trump administration’s posture toward the continent this year has moved well past rhetoric: South Africa barred from the 2026 G20 in Miami, new tariffs layered onto seven African economies including Nigeria, aid programmes gutted, refugee admissions functionally closed to Africans while carved open for Afrikaners citing a contested “genocide” claim African leaders themselves have rejected as insulting. None of that policy architecture was built because Washington read the World Bank’s poverty figures and felt moved to intervene. It was built on a settled premise, first voiced crudely as “shithole countries” in 2018 and now available in a more decorous register, that Africa is a problem that manages itself badly and should therefore be managed from outside, or not managed at all.
A president telling his own bishops that hunger is an inheritance rather than an instruction does not contest that premise. He confirms it, in his own words, on video, to a room full of clergy who came looking for policy and left with theology.
The Church Cannot Levy Tax
The sharpest line to come out of the episode belongs not to a politician but to Ladipo Johnson of the Nigerian Democratic Congress, who observed, correctly, that churches do not collect taxes, and citizens who do pay them are entitled to expect the state, not the sacristy, to answer for their dinner. It is a point of basic constitutional logic dressed as a rebuke: the fiscal relationship between a Nigerian citizen and the Nigerian state does not run through the offering plate. If the President wishes to delegate the feeding of the nation to religious institutions, he might first consider delegating the collection of value-added tax to them as well, and see how quickly the arrangement is reconsidered.
Hunger, as Peter Obi conceded with more grace than the President managed, has indeed been part of Nigerian life for decades. That was never the argument. The argument is that a government’s entire claim to legitimacy rests on being able to say, credibly, that things are less bad on its watch than the watch before, and that claim cannot be sustained by pointing at the horizon and declaring the weather someone else’s problem.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 