BY LANRE OGUNDIPE
THERE is a deceptively simple sentence in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s October 1 Independence Day address that may prove more consequential than the rhetoric surrounding it.
“These programmes are not substitutes for prosperity. They are a bridge to aid our nation’s citizens on their path towards it.”
The President immediately supplied the destination: “Our objective is not to manage poverty more efficiently. We will defeat it.” He went further. The emergency treatment, he declared, was over; the country had corrected its economic course and was entering an “age of prosperity.”
The metaphor of the bridge therefore deserves to be taken seriously.
A bridge is not a destination. It is a temporary structure connecting one condition to another. Its purpose is movement. People do not build homes on a bridge because the very reason for its existence is to get them somewhere else.
That is the intellectual problem hidden inside the President’s reassuring formulation.
When does government know that enough Nigerians have crossed?
And, more importantly, what happens to those who have not?
The administration has placed direct support for vulnerable households, an improved National Social Register, education financing, consumer credit, primary healthcare, basic education and other interventions within this broader framework. The President explicitly acknowledged that millions of Nigerians still struggle with food, school fees, medical bills and the cost of getting to work. He also acknowledged that these conditions predate the present reforms and reflect decades of low productivity, inadequate infrastructure and insufficient opportunity.
That acknowledgement is important because it exposes the difficulty of determining when assistance should end.
Nigeria’s vulnerable citizens are not beginning from the same point. One household may have experienced a temporary loss of purchasing power but retain assets, education, skills and a functioning enterprise. Another may have lost employment and exhausted its savings. Another may have never possessed a stable income at all. For such households, the distance between emergency relief and economic independence is not the same.
A bridge designed around an average traveller may leave the most vulnerable stranded in the middle.
This is why social intervention requires something more demanding than a list of beneficiaries or the amount of money disbursed. Government needs to know whether intervention has produced movement.
Has a household acquired a sustainable income? Has a young person moved from training into productive employment? Has a small enterprise become sufficiently viable to survive without recurring public assistance? Has a family developed enough resilience to absorb the next economic shock without falling back into extreme vulnerability?
These are harder questions than how many people received assistance, but they are closer to the real meaning of defeating poverty.
The danger is present at both ends.
Withdraw support before the productive economy is capable of absorbing those coming off it, and government risks creating another form of hardship. Maintain emergency assistance indefinitely without building the productive capacity that makes such assistance unnecessary, and temporary protection can gradually become permanent dependence.
Neither is prosperity.
The purpose of reform, therefore, cannot simply be to make poverty easier to administer. It must alter the conditions that reproduce it.
That requires the bridge to connect to something tangible: productive employment, functioning enterprises, affordable credit, reliable electricity, efficient transport, stronger domestic production, accessible markets and human capital capable of participating in a changing economy.
The President himself described prosperity in these terms. He spoke of farmers producing more cheaply, factories receiving reliable power, businesses obtaining credit, young people finding productive work, and lower production and transportation costs eventually feeding into market prices.
That is a substantially more demanding proposition than social protection.
It shifts the centre of economic policy from helping people survive a difficult transition to creating conditions under which they can prosper without permanent intervention.
And that is precisely where the bridge metaphor acquires its greatest significance.
A government that describes its assistance as a bridge should also be able to define the conditions for crossing it. The country needs more than a programme calendar. It needs an exit philosophy.
What constitutes graduation from assistance?
What level of income security demonstrates that a household has crossed?
How is resilience measured?
What happens to those who remain vulnerable after the official programme has ended?
Who monitors the people who fall through the gap between intervention and independence?
These cannot be questions postponed until the money runs out.
There is another danger. Government can become so preoccupied with administering the bridge that it forgets to build the economy on the other side.
A beautifully administered poverty programme is still a poverty programme if the underlying economy continues to generate the conditions that make millions of people require it.
The challenge is therefore no longer merely whether the state can reach vulnerable Nigerians. It is whether those interventions are connected to an economy capable of making vulnerability less permanent.
That distinction matters.
The President has declared that the age of reform has done its work and that the age of prosperity has begun. If that is the new phase of the national project, the test changes accordingly.
The argument can no longer end with an explanation of why Nigerians had to endure painful adjustment. The next question is what the adjustment has made possible.
That is where the idea of an exit strategy becomes indispensable.
The government should be able to tell Nigerians not only how many people it is helping today, but how it intends to reduce the number of people who will require that help tomorrow.
That is the difference between managing vulnerability and defeating poverty.
It is also the difference between a bridge and a destination.
The ultimate measure of the bridge will not be its size, its cost or the number of people who once stood upon it. It will be whether Nigerians emerge from it into an economy where work can produce dignity, enterprise can produce security and families can withstand ordinary shocks without waiting for extraordinary intervention.
The President has said the destination is now in sight.
Then the country should begin measuring the distance.
Because a bridge does not prove its worth by standing. It proves its worth by getting people across.
Ogundipe, public affairs analyst and former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists, writes this column every Monday.
