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Wednesday, February 14,
2024
Nagging Constraints to Democratic Stability and Economic Prosperity in
Nigeria
Prepared statement by
Ebenezer Obadare
Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies
Council on Foreign Relations
Before the
House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa
United States House of Representatives
2
nd
Session, 118
th
Congress
Chairman James, Ranking Member Jacobs, and members of the Subcommittee, I am grateful for the
privilege of testifying before you on the subject of “The Future of Freedom in Nigeria.”
Judging by mainstream and social media commentary in recent weeks, the mood among a section of the
Nigerian public has turned decidedly foul.
One does not have to search far and wide for the immediate trigger.
As President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who took office last May following a deeply polarizing presidential
election, attempts to push through a series of market-friendly measures—the most contentious being the
withdrawal of official subsidy on petrol—a predictable rise in the cost of living has sent the public reeling,
with newspaper headlines dominated by accounts of everyday Nigerians resorting to all manner of
desperate survival measures. In one by no means atypical example, thirty-eight-year-old Chinyere Chukwu
was apprehended after arranging to sell off her two sons “due to the economic hardship in the country.” The
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that as many as twenty-five million Nigerians are “at
high risk of food insecurity.”
For the average Nigerian, economic pain is compounded by widespread insecurity, the latter highlighted by
a protracted Islamist insurgency, bandit attacks on farming communities, regular law enforcement assaults
on ordinary citizens, a palpable rise in the incidence of kidnapping for ransom, and vigilante justice. The
Civil Society Joint Action Group, a collection of Nigerian civil society organizations, calculates that 2,423
