Nigeria’s experience poses a development puzzle: Real Gross Domestic ProductRGDP) expanded more than fourfold between 1986 and 2023, yet the poverty headcount remained above half of the population for most of the period. This paper argues that growth-centric policy thinking is insufficient, and that job creation should be reconceived as a strategy for poverty reduction rather than a by-product of aggregate expansion. Adopting a transmission-mechanism perspective, it traces the channels through which fiscal effort and job creation are expected to flow into poverty reduction and growth, and uses an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model on annual data (1986–2023) to test which links are empirically live. The bounds test confirms a long-run equilibrium among the variables. The estimates reveal a selective transmission: the participation and unemployment channels transmit strongly (labour-force participation raises RGDP and unemployment lowers it, both significant in the short and long run); poverty exerts a significant drag consistent with a poverty trap; but the inequality and human-capital (literacy) channels do not transmit significantly within the period; and the fiscal channel, though positive, exhibits short-run crowding-out and a slow speed of adjustment (about 9.8% per annum), indicating structural leakages. The paper concludes that breaking Nigeria’s growth–poverty disconnect requires reorienting job creation toward labour-intensive, pro-poor strategies, repairing the dormant distribution and human-capital channels, and improving the efficiency of fiscal reinvestment.