Nigeria, stoppp!!!!!
Lagos says it’s too bougie for beggars. Also, the FG is trying to explain an ₦8 trillion reporting gap; Nigerian media is sick of big tech’s greedy ass; and INEC extends PVC registration by two weeks
Good morning, Big Brains. Today is my defence, and I’m feeling super optimistic. If it goes well, I’ll definitely tell you guys, cos we tight like that. 🤞🏾😌 Let’s get into it.
- Orame
Word count: 1,915 words
Reading time: 11 mins
In the madhouse that is Nigeria, many things go down within the week, and it can be difficult to grasp them all. This edition of The Big Daily cuts through the noise and sifts through the debris to bring you the four biggest news stories that shaped the week.
Let’s get into this week’s Big-4:
Lagos thinks it’s too bougie for beggars
FG made an ₦8 trillion worth of whoops
The Nigerian media wants big tech to pay up
INEC just gave you two more weeks to get your PVC
Lagos thinks it’s too bougie for beggars
We know self-love is a big thing these days, but apparently, self-awareness isn’t; it’s been replaced by a mighty amount of delulu, and Lagos State is swimming in it.
On Wednesday, July 7, the Lagos State Assembly held its second reading of a bill to prohibit street begging.
The lawmakers say they’re doing this because some criminals disguise themselves as beggars to commit theft and robbery, while many people increasingly exploit children for alms.
The move came just a day after the state arrested 396 beggars, saying they would be profiled and returned to their states of origin.
We’re not going to pretend that the state’s concerns are imaginary because they aren’t. But there are just so many things wrong with this move.
For starters, there are thousands of genuinely destitute people begging on the streets because it’s the only thing between them and the grave.
It’s unfortunate that crimes are committed in their names, but the State shouldn’t criminalise poverty in its attempt to fix one issue.
Even inside the Assembly, not everyone seemed convinced that punishment was the answer. Desmond Elliot argued that children found begging should be treated differently, while Aro Moshood warned that the law could easily become another excuse for harassment by law enforcement.
They’re right to worry because this bill is trying to solve the final chapter of a story while pretending the first ten chapters don’t exist.
Begging is what poverty looks like after every other safety net has failed. Sure, it’d be great to have a state free of beggars, but Lagos is jumping the gun; it’s simply not there yet.
A 2023 World Bank diagnostic report shows that nearly 80% of households in Lagos are considered poor. What makes this crazier is that the report was done using the state’s own multidimensional poverty indicators.
The state is also battling a housing deficit of roughly 3.4 million homes, leaving millions priced out of decent shelter.
Nationally, the situation is even worse. Around 46% of Nigerians live below the poverty line, while more than 133 million people are classified as multidimensionally poor.
None of these numbers describes a country or state ready for streets free of beggars.
It’s easy for lawmakers to turn up their noses at street begging while presenting this bill as their solution. It’s easy because they’re so out of touch that they imagine beggars will behave once the law prohibits them.
Their lives are so cushioned that they don’t have the slightest idea what some Nigerians go through, let alone the beggars. Nothing explains this lack of awareness better than the President’s spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, insisting that Nigerians are exaggerating their hunger levels because those around him don’t complain.
What’s more insane is that the same Assembly spitting at the poverty created by the State is the same one that budgeted ₦20 billion for official vehicles in Lagos’ 2026 budget. The joke writes itself.
We agree that public spaces should be safe, clean and orderly. That children shouldn’t be exploited, and residents shouldn’t be harassed, but those outcomes don’t happen when you threaten poor people.
They naturally occur when a government invests in affordable housing, functioning welfare systems, and good living conditions that enable people to keep their dignity rather than beg for scraps to survive.
FG made an ₦8 trillion worth of whoops
There are very few things Nigerians ask of their government. One of them is surprisingly modest: if you spend our money, please tell us where it went. But the bar is in hell because we can’t even get that.
That’s why the latest disagreement between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Nigerian government is painfully unsurprising. At the Fund’s recent briefing, its Nigeria Representative, Christian Ebeke, said public spending worth more than ₦8 trillion was never reflected in the country’s official money records.
Don’t clutch your pearls just yet: the government was not accused of stealing ₦8 trillion; It’s just being asked to show how it spent the money. It’s like your friend borrowing ₦5,000 from you, insisting they spent it responsibly but wouldn’t show a single bank alert to prove it.
We already know the federal government doesn’t rate us, but civic organisations like BudgIT are asking it to have some shame for the sake of the outside world.
The organisation’s Country Director, Vahyala Kwaga, has warned that failure to properly record spending “distorts the country’s debt position, weakens fiscal transparency and erodes investor confidence.”
As expected, Nigeria’s Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele pushed back hard, insisting this is all a huge misunderstanding.
He said the ₦8 trillion was spent on lawful items that don’t fit neatly into the standard budget format, such as transfers to development commissions, debt servicing, security, and multi-year capital projects rolled over across budget cycles.
In other words, the government says the money was spent legitimately but recorded differently. We’re not accusing the government of anything, but this kind of omission is too suspicious to overlook.
What makes this even harder to ignore is that it follows another embarrassing transparency failure. Just last week, on July 1, it was found that ₦1.3 billion had been allocated to the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), an agency the Tinubu administration swears does not exist.
The agency reportedly secured office space, opened bank accounts and operated for about two years undisturbed.
On its own, the fake agency is alarming. Alongside an ₦8 trillion reporting gap, it begins to paint a picture of a public finance system that isn’t inspiring confidence.
Nigeria is already battling rising debt, high inflation and sluggish investor confidence. The last thing the country needs is uncertainty over whether its own financial records accurately reflect how public money is spent.
If ₦8 trillion was spent, Nigerians deserve to see exactly where it appears in the country’s books.
The Nigerian media wants big tech to pay up
There was a time when news companies worried about people copying their stories word for word. Today, they’re worried that billion-dollar AI companies aren’t giving them the money or reach they deserve. They’ve asked the government to help fix it.
On Monday, July 6, President Bola Tinubu directed the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) to investigate Meta, Alphabet, X and some generative AI platforms over complaints that they unfairly profit from Nigerian news content, including allegedly using it to train AI models.
The complaints came from some of the country’s journalism bodies, including the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN) and the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), who say these platforms profit from Nigerian journalism while paying publishers peanuts. They also allege the companies train AI systems worth billions of dollars off their hard work.
FCCPC boss, Tunji Bello, said the commission isn’t accusing these companies of anything and only wants to “objectively determine the facts.”
Tinubu’s request isn’t outrageous; governments around the world are asking the same questions. The FCCPC itself pointed to South Africa, where regulatory pressure pushed Google to agree to pay South African publishers about $40 million over three to five years.
We also found that Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code pushed Google and Meta into commercial agreements with news publishers over similar issues.
Nigeria isn’t copying these countries; it’s responding to a global debate that has become impossible to ignore: who should benefit when journalism fuels the digital economy?
The FCCPC isn’t new to taking on Big Tech either. In 2024, it fined Meta $220 million over alleged data privacy and consumer rights violations, a decision later upheld by the Competition and Consumer Protection Tribunal. So the regulator clearly has teeth, and we’re curious to see how hard it can bite here.
Journalism in Nigeria is already underfunded and constantly under political pressure. If global tech platforms are scraping local news content to build products worth billions without paying the newsrooms that produced it, that’s one more brick pulled out of an already shaky foundation for the industry.
If the FCCPC finds no evidence of anti-competitive behaviour or unfair practices, Nigerians deserve to know that. If it does, then publishers deserve whatever protections or compensation the law allows.
INEC just gave you two more weeks to get your PVC
Good news doesn’t happen often in this country, so let’s actually bask in this one for a second.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has extended the ongoing Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) exercise by two weeks, moving the deadline from July 10 to July 26, 2026.
It also launched a self-service online registration portal that allows eligible first-time voters to complete biometric capture on their own devices, instead of relying entirely on registration centres.
The extension comes after weeks of frustration. Nigerians in Rivers, Oyo, Lagos and the FCT have spent weeks complaining about network outages, endless queues and centres that simply shut down mid-registration, forcing people to come back day after day.
In Abuja alone, applicants told Vanguard they’d arrived as early as 7 am, only to still be waiting several hours, with some going and coming for a full week without successfully registering. So this extension is just great. The new online option is also promising, but only if INEC has fixed the problems that made physical registration so frustrating in the first place.
A digital portal can’t solve unreliable servers, and it certainly can’t help communities with poor internet access. Technology is only as useful as the infrastructure behind it.
Still, this is another opportunity to get more Nigerians onto the voter register before the 2027 elections, and it’s one worth taking.
If you’ve been putting off your registration or were turned away because of technical issues, please try again. Elections don’t begin on polling day. They begin with voter registration. Hopefully, this time, INEC holds up its end of the bargain, too.
Your next big read
→Nigeria Is Messing with Your Head. Here’s The Proof: A breakdown of exactly how Nigeria’s economic and governance failures are quietly wrecking the mental health of everyday citizens, and why your empty wallet isn’t just a personal problem.
→Politicians Are Getting Ready For The 2027 Elections. Are You?: Why the political class is already gearing up for 2027 while most Nigerians haven’t even registered to vote, and what that head start could cost you.
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Good morning, Big Brains. All my friends are leaving school, and I’m still stuck here preparing for my project defence. If I don’t get an A in this thing, eh. Let’s get into it.