A poor Nigerian pays more for almost everything.
Not because the shopkeeper necessarily charges him more, but because he cannot afford to buy things in the way people with money do. He buys the small bottle because he cannot buy the carton. He buys fuel in litres because he cannot fill the tank. He repairs the phone because replacing it would swallow money he does not have. He takes the cheaper bus even when the journey will take twice as long. When the roof begins to leak, he puts a bowl under it and hopes the rain stops before the next problem arrives.
We usually call this survival. Sometimes it is simply what poverty looks like when there is no room left to make a mistake.
This is one of the things that gets lost whenever poverty is reduced to a figure showing how much somebody earns. Money matters, obviously, but the amount coming into a household does not tell the whole story. What matters just as much is how much of that money disappears simply because the person has no cushion.
Someone with savings can buy a larger quantity when prices are favourable. Someone without savings buys what he can afford that morning, even when the smaller quantity costs more per unit. A household with a reliable car can absorb an increase in transport fares by driving more. A household that depends entirely on public transport cannot. Someone with a generator, inverter or solar system can retreat from a power outage. Someone who has none of those things simply waits, pays for charging, or watches another day’s work disappear.
The strange thing is that the poorer you are, the more expensive a mistake becomes.
A broken phone is not just a broken phone when it is the only way you receive orders from customers. A faulty motorcycle is not simply a repair bill when the motorcycle is how the owner earns his living. Missing one day’s work because there is no money for transport can mean missing the meal that day, or borrowing from someone who is already tired of lending. An illness that might have been manageable becomes frightening when the money for treatment has to come from rent, school fees or food.
This is why the cost of living cannot be understood simply by looking at the price of petrol.
Petrol became one of the most visible symbols of Nigeria’s economic pain because almost everything moves through it. But the deeper problem is what happens when the systems around ordinary people are so unreliable that they have to keep paying privately to replace what should have been provided collectively.
Electricity is perhaps the clearest example. When public power is unreliable, households and businesses do not stop needing electricity. They find another way to get it. Somebody buys a generator. Somebody buys fuel. Somebody pays to repair the generator. Somebody buys an inverter. Somebody eventually considers solar. A business passes some of those costs into the price of what it sells, so the person who never owned a generator can still end up paying for the country’s electricity problem every time he buys bread, charges his phone or pays for a service.
The World Bank has estimated the economic losses from unreliable electricity supply in Nigeria at several trillion naira a year, while current programmes are still focused on expanding access to cheaper and more reliable electricity and reducing dependence on expensive diesel generators.
The same logic appears in transport. When roads are bad and public transport is inadequate, people pay in money, time and lost productivity. The wealthy can sometimes escape by living closer to work, driving private cars or paying for faster alternatives. For everyone else, the cost is measured in crowded buses, long journeys, higher fares, vehicle repairs and hours that could have been spent working, resting or caring for children.
There is a quiet tax hidden inside all of this.
You see it in the small decisions people make every day. Someone buys food in small quantities because there is never enough money to stock up. A trader borrows to keep the business going and spends part of the next day’s earnings paying back the loan. A family puts off going to the hospital because there is school fees to pay and food to buy. A small business spends so much keeping the lights on, moving goods and fixing equipment that there is barely anything left when the day’s sales are over.
Poverty therefore becomes more than a shortage of income. It becomes a shortage of options.
That distinction is important because options are one of the things money quietly buys. Savings give you time. Credit gives you flexibility. Insurance gives you protection against certain shocks. A functioning public service gives you an alternative to paying privately. When those things are absent, every disruption lands directly on the household.
Nigeria’s own multidimensional poverty figures tell a larger story than income alone. The National Bureau of Statistics found that about 133 million Nigerians were living in multidimensional poverty, with deprivation extending beyond money into areas such as education, health, living conditions, sanitation, cooking fuel and access to services.
That is why the language of resilience can sometimes become misleading.
Nigerians are resilient, certainly. But resilience is often what people call the ability to keep functioning after institutions have failed them repeatedly. The woman who wakes before dawn to make food for her family, runs a small business during the day and finds another way to pay the children’s fees when sales are poor is resilient. So is the mechanic who keeps his workshop open through power cuts and rising costs. But there is a point at which praising resilience becomes a convenient way of avoiding the more uncomfortable question: why must ordinary people be this resilient just to maintain an ordinary life?
A country should not measure its success by how much hardship its citizens can endure.
It should be possible for a person who works hard to make mistakes without falling through the floor. A business should be able to lose a week without closing permanently. A family should be able to take a sick child to a hospital without wondering which essential bill will have to wait. A young person should be able to look for work without spending money every day merely to remain available for the opportunity.
None of this means government can eliminate every difficulty from people’s lives. It cannot. But government can make the basic business of living less expensive.
That is the part of economic reform that is often missing from political arguments. We talk about removing subsidies, increasing revenue, attracting investment, stabilising the currency and reducing deficits because these are important things. But the ordinary citizen eventually asks a much simpler question: after all these changes, is my life becoming cheaper or more manageable?
The answer cannot be found in GDP figures alone.
It is found in whether electricity is reliable enough for a small business to plan around. Whether a road allows a farmer’s goods to reach a market without losing money along the way. Whether a public hospital can treat a family before the family has exhausted its savings. Whether a child can receive a decent education without the household taking on another financial burden. Whether public transport is good enough that going to work does not become a daily economic calculation.
This is also why poverty should not be treated as a problem that can be solved simply by putting more money into people’s pockets. Higher incomes matter enormously, but if every basic service remains something households must purchase privately, some of that additional income will simply disappear into the cost of compensating for broken systems.
The better ambition is to make ordinary life cost less.
Give people more reliable electricity and they spend less defending themselves against darkness. Give them better roads and transport and they spend less defending themselves against distance. Give them functioning public healthcare and they spend less defending themselves against illness. Give them schools that work and families do not have to spend as much trying to purchase a private substitute.
That is what a functioning economy should eventually feel like at street level: not a series of impressive numbers, but a little less money disappearing for reasons that have nothing to do with living well.
Nigeria has spent years asking how to make the economy bigger. It also needs to ask how to make life cheaper for the people inside it.
Because for someone living from one expense to the next, the greatest luxury is not petrol at a lower price, a new car or a bigger house. It is having enough left over after the necessities to survive the next unexpected thing.
That margin is what poverty takes away.
And until ordinary Nigerians have it back, economic growth will remain something they hear about long before they feel it.
Stephanie Shaakaa Shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
08034861434
