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Nigeria's headline economic numbers are the strongest they have been in years. On The Africa Desk Live on August 1, two Nigerian economists spent an hour on why so little of that progress has reached ordinary households.

Mma Amara Ekeruche, senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of the Economies of Africa in Abuja, laid out the good news: growth around four percent, inflation down from its peak to about 23 percent, a unified exchange rate and the end of the petrol subsidy. Professor Bongo Adi of Lagos Business School added that foreign reserves have reached a level not seen in close to 17 years.

Then Ekeruche questioned the premise. These are orthodox reforms, she said, and in an economy where one in three people live in extreme poverty, a subsidy is not the obvious first thing to remove.

"The poor is an afterthought"

Adi described Nigeria's economy as a system of political compensation, where reforms are chosen to suit the ruling coalition rather than their impact.

"If you are not a member of the ruling coalition, you get nothing," he said. "The poor is an afterthought."

He pointed to the data. Private consumption and private investment are stagnant, while government spending has ballooned. Allocations to some states have risen by more than 100 percent, he said, with little scrutiny of how the money is spent outside Lagos and Abuja. Asked whether federalism has been a blessing or a curse for Nigeria, he did not hedge. A curse, he said.

Asked what would change a household budget within 12 months, Adi named electricity and Ekeruche named food and fuel. Their messages to the President were short. Get involved, said Adi. Stop copying and pasting, said Ekeruche.

The view from Dakar

Dr. Gilles Yabi, founder and chief executive of the Dakar think tank WATHI, noted that Nigeria produces close to 60 percent of West Africa's economic output and that one in five Africans is Nigerian. He argued that the weakening of ECOWAS follows directly from the weakening of its member states, Nigeria above all.

"You cannot have an efficient ECOWAS with dysfunctional member states," Yabi said.

He called two ECOWAS responses to the region's coups outright mistakes, the extensive sanctions and the threat of military intervention in Niger, because both let the military governments turn a coup into a sovereignty story.