The President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB) administration has sunk over 82 million Nigerians into abject poverty according to report from the administration’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The highest poverty levels were in the northwest state of Sokoto, where 87.7% of people live under the poverty line compared with 4.5% in commercial hub Lagos State, which had the lowest rate.
The World Poverty Clock report of 2018 said Nigeria overtook India as the country with the most extreme poor people in the world.
The tide has continually nosedived and gets worse as Buhari and his economic managers progressively grapple with the shaming realities.
The NBS report of 2018/2019 released this week said 40% of Nigerians live below its poverty line of N137,430 ($381.75) per year. This makes 82.9 million people out of a population of about 200 million live in wanton poverty.
The United Nations (UN) guesstimated the most populous nation in Africa will have a population of about 400 million people by in the next 30 years.
According to the NBS, “40.1% of Nigeria’s population was classified as poor. Four out of 10 Nigerias have real per capita expenditures below N137,430 ($352) per year.”
It was revealed that said 52% Nigerians in the rural areas live in extreme poverty, compared with 18 per cent in urban parts of the country.
Anote Ajeluorou of Guardian Newspaper said: “The struggle to lift more citizens out of extreme poverty is an indictment on successive Nigerian governments, including the current one, which has mismanaged the country’s vast oil riches through incompetence and corruption. Nigeria has extreme poverty population as at June 2018 and this grim outlook has persisted without respite through 2019 to 2020.”
Furthermore, he asked out of chaste frustration: “Coming now as it does when the world is fighting coronavirus is telling for its projection for the future and the planning that should happen. But is Nigeria and Nigerians capable of planning for the future? Would this coronavirus pandemic inject that missing developmental mental attitude on Nigerians and those who lead them to begin serious reengineering of the country’s broken infrastructure and what must be done to lift millions out of poverty? Is Nigeria’s inept leadership sufficiently challenged to do the needful to take so many Nigerians out of poverty?”
