A Nation Struggling to Survive

With 141 million people projected to live below the poverty line in 2026, Africa's most populous nation faces a humanitarian catastrophe that its leaders have been slow to acknowledge and even slower to address.

The numbers scream outrage. Nigeria's poverty rate, which stood at 59 per cent in 2024, climbed to 61 per cent — representing 139 million people — in 2025 and is now projected to reach 62 per cent, or 141 million people, by the end of 2026. That figure, drawn from PricewaterhouseCoopers' Nigeria Economic Outlook 2026, means that nearly two in every three Nigerians are struggling to meet the most basic requirements of daily life. It is an indictment of governance that has delivered macroeconomic reform on paper while delivering misery on the ground.

The World Bank's Nigeria Development Update corroborates the picture. The absolute number of people living in poverty has increased sharply, from about 81 million in 2019 to roughly 139 million in 2025. Earlier estimates showed about 115 million Nigerians in poverty in 2023, rising to around 129 million in 2024 — indicating that roughly 14 million people fell into poverty in just one year. By any standard of measurement, this is not a crisis in the making; it is a crisis long arrived.

The Cost of Reform

President Bola Tinubu came to office in May 2023 pledging economic transformation. His administration embarked on a sweeping market-oriented reform program aimed at restoring stability and predictability to an economy long characterized by volatility.

Measures such as the removal of petrol subsidies, electricity tariff adjustments, and the liberalisation of the foreign exchange market helped correct deep-seated distortions and strengthen public finances. Yet the sequencing and scale of these shocks—imposed without adequate social cushioning—have proved devastating for ordinary households.

Tinubu declared in his presidential inaugural speech, "the fuel subsidy is gone," overseeing a petrol price hike of nearly 488 per cent in Africa's largest producer by October 2024. This also increased the price of electricity multifold because more than 58 per cent of Nigerian households, left out of the national grid, rely on petrol and diesel generators. The cascading effect on transport, food logistics, and small business operations has been ruinous.

Nominal household spending rose by 19.6 per cent from N116.5tn in 2024 to an estimated N139.3tn in 2025, reflecting rising prices rather than improved welfare. In real terms, household consumption contracted by 2.5 per cent over the same period—a telling distinction between the illusion of growth and the lived reality of decline.

Food as a Luxury

Nowhere is the crisis more acute than at the dinner table. For low-income households, food accounts for as much as 70 per cent of total consumption, making them especially vulnerable to price shocks. When the price of staple foods surges, these families do not merely cut back—they go without.

Food inflation reached 40.9 per cent in June 2024, a record high driven by currency depreciation and high transportation costs. The price of beans in October 2024 was 282 per cent above the same period in 2023. Similarly, the price of local rice rose by 153 per cent compared to the previous year.

One widely cited indicator tells the story plainly: the cost of cooking a single pot of jollof rice—Nigeria's enduring cultural staple — rose to ₦25,486 from ₦21,300, a 19 per cent spike, between September 2024 and March 2025. For millions, a dish that once defined communal celebration has become an unaffordable indulgence.

Approximately 33.1 million Nigerians face food insecurity due to economic hardship and violence in northern food-producing regions. In the North-East, conflict between Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and their affiliates has compounded the misery. Escalating violence throughout 2025 disrupted agricultural production and markets, limiting economic activity and livelihoods, with an estimated 1.38 million people remaining internally displaced by late 2025.

Ultra-Poverty and the Invisible Crisis

Beyond the headline poverty rate lies a more alarming figure. The share of ultra-poor Nigerians — households unable to meet basic calorie needs even if they were to spend all their income on food — rose from 14 per cent in 2019 to 27 per cent in 2023, representing about 70 million people. This is not poverty in an abstract statistical sense; it is hunger measured in physical deterioration and shortened lives.

The World Bank has noted that despite signs of inflation moderating, the lingering effects of inflation spikes never go away for poor people. Although inflation is expected to ease, poor households continue to grapple with the aftershocks of sudden increases in spending.  The damage to purchasing power, accumulated over years of naira depreciation and soaring prices, cannot be undone by a statistical rebasing of the consumer price index.

Structural Failures

Nigeria's minimum wage, in its current form, falls far short of a living wage. Millions of workers cannot afford the basics despite being employed — a recipe for frustration and social breakdown. The problem is structural: an economy where GDP growth does not translate into household welfare gains. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a 1 per cent increase in GDP per capita leads to only a 1 per cent drop in poverty. In the rest of the world, the same growth yields a 2.5 per cent reduction. Nigeria's growth, concentrated in finance, telecoms, and oil, bypasses the urban poor and rural majority entirely.

The government's social protection response has been chronically inadequate. In October 2023, the government announced a ₦25,000 monthly cash transfer for three months to 15 million households to help cushion the impact of inflation. But only about 5 million households received payments—a shortfall that illustrates the yawning gap between policy announcements and implementation.

A Government in Denial

Confronted with the evidence, Nigeria's presidency has chosen dispute over engagement. President Tinubu's Special Adviser on Media and Public Communication, Sunday Dare, said on social media that the statistics were "unrealistic" and should be "properly contextualised" within global poverty measurement frameworks. This response is as telling as the data itself.

PwC and the World Bank are unambiguous. Without targeted interventions such as job creation, productivity improvements, and effective social protection programmes, reducing poverty levels in Nigeria will remain a major challenge. The World Bank projects that poverty could ease marginally to 61 per cent in 2027 — which would mark the first decline in nearly a decade. But for millions, especially in rural and northern regions, prospects of relief remain distant, as food inflation, structural inequality, and weak social protection systems continue to deepen hardship.

Nigeria is not a poor country. It is a country of extraordinary resources governed in ways that have systematically impoverished its people. Until its leaders reckon honestly with that distinction, the alarm bells will keep ringing — and 141 million Nigerians will keep paying the price.