Ask ten Nigerians who made them poor and you will hear ten different names. Ask the numbers, and the answer is more complicated than any campaign poster will admit.
Start with the simple facts. In 2018/19, the Nigeria Living Standards Survey put poverty at 40 per cent of the population, about 81 million people. By 2025, an estimated 139 million Nigerians were living below the poverty line, and that figure measures far more than empty pockets. Poverty in Nigeria has a money dimension, which is the share of people whose spending cannot cover a basic basket of food and necessities. It also has a human dimension that income alone cannot capture: children who never finish school or learn to read, families far from a clinic or unable to afford care, homes without electricity, clean water, decent sanitation or clean cooking fuel, and households with no steady work that live under the shadow of hunger, flooding and insecurity. The National Bureau of Statistics captured this wider picture in its multidimensional poverty index, which looked at health, education, living standards, and work and shocks. It found that a majority of Nigerians were deprived in several of these areas at once. A person can therefore be counted as poor because of what they earn, because of what they cannot access, or, as is common in rural Nigeria, both.
On the money measure, the World Bank projects and estimates Nigeria’s poverty rate at approximately 63 per cent for 2025 and 2026, affecting roughly 139 to 142 million people. It expects a gradual decline to about 58 to 59 per cent by 2028. That would be the first meaningful dip in nearly ten years, and the early part of it lands in an election cycle.
Now the part many politicians skip. The World Bank says three-quarters of the rise in poverty between 2019 and 2023 happened before 2023. That is before Bola Tinubu took the oath. It also found that average consumption fell by 6.7 per cent over those years. The ultra-poor, those who cannot afford enough food even if they spend everything on eating, jumped from 14 per cent to 27 per cent between 2019 and 2023. So the bleeding started under the last government.
The trouble did not begin with Buhari either. In 2018, the Brookings Institution said Nigeria had overtaken India as the country with the most people in extreme poverty, about 86.9 million. That same period saw unemployment climb from 7.5 per cent in early 2015 to 23.1 per cent by late 2018. The economy had also slipped into recession in 2016 and only exited in September 2017. Buhari’s government argued such reports were captured during the recession. Yet one researcher quoted by Africa Check traced Nigeria’s deep poverty back to the 1980s, when a global recession and oil price collapse made poverty endemic. Poverty in Nigeria is a very old wound.
Tinubu’s critics have their own strong facts. On his first day he removed the fuel subsidy and unified the exchange rates, measures that drove inflation sharply higher and squeezed household incomes. That hurts most where the poor feel it, because low-income households spend 60 to 70 per cent of their income on food. The World Bank’s April 2025 report also flagged Nigeria as home to the largest number of extremely poor people in the world.
His defenders answer that the pain was the price of repair. The president compared the old system to a cancer patient choosing between painful treatment or morphine that hides the disease while it spreads. The numbers he points to are real. GDP grew 4.43 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, up from 3.89 per cent in the first. Inflation eased to 14.45 per cent in November 2025. His government also rejects the poverty headcount, with a spokesman saying the World Bank figure should not be read as a literal, real-time count.
Here is the caution for readers. Lower inflation does not mean prices have gone back to what they were. A tin of tomatoes that doubled in price does not become cheap because it stopped rising. Some analysts also note that the statistics bureau’s rebasing produced a much smaller inflation figure that gives the impression of a crash. One research head says Nigeria would need 7 to 9 per cent growth to change the poverty picture, and today’s growth is about half that.
Then there is geography. More than 7 in 10 people in the north are poor, compared with about 3 in 10 in the south. No single president created that gap. It reflects insecurity, weak farming income and decades of neglect by governments at every level.
So who is truly responsible? The record shows poverty rising under both the last administration and this one, and the largest part of the climb coming before 2023. It also shows Tinubu’s reforms adding a heavy short-term cost, with the payoff still to be proven. Whether the promised recovery is real is what voters must weigh in 2027. Check the price of rice in your own market, ask whether your income buys more than it did three years ago, and then ask every candidate, from every party, what exactly they will do about it.
Faleye writes from Lagos
By Seunmanuel Faleye
