ADC Knocks Tinubu Over 63% Poverty Rate

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has said a recent report indicating Nigeria’s poverty rate has risen to 63% after the removal of petrol subsidy reflects the real scorecard of President Bola Tinubu.

The party said the poverty rate was a consequence of the president’s ill-defined neoliberal economic policies.

A research, presented at a stakeholders’ dialogue organised by Agora Policy in Abuja on Thursday, showed that the national poverty headcount rose sharply from a baseline of about 49.8 per cent to roughly 63 per cent following the subsidy removal before moderating slightly after the introduction of social protection measures.

The dialogue, themed “Sustaining and Deepening Economic Reforms in Nigeria,” brought together policymakers, economists, civil society leaders, and private sector representatives to examine the effects of the Federal Government’s reform agenda.

The National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, in a statement, said the new figures reflect the worsening economic hardship facing millions of Nigerians as rising fuel and transport costs continue to push up the cost of living.

The ADC noted that the new report only confirms earlier surveys that indicate deep public dissatisfaction with the direction the country is heading under the APC administration.

The ADC spokesman said the report, presented at a policy dialogue in Abuja Thursday, indicated that poverty in Nigeria rose sharply from about 50 percent before the subsidy removal to 63 percent afterward, as higher fuel and transport costs spread through the economy and drove up the prices of food, transportation, and other basic necessities.

He added that the verdict reflects the real consequences of the APC government’s hasty removal of fuel subsidy without giving full consideration to how such a serious decision would impact on the livelihoods of ordinary citizens.

Abdullahi dismissed the government’s repeated justification of subsidy removal of subsidy on the need to divert resources to areas of critical needs, including health and education.

He said none of these sectors has been funded any better, and citizens have not seen the benefits of subsidy removal, three years after the administration came to power.

Abdullahi said independent surveys show that 93 percent of Nigerians believe that under President Tinubu, the country is heading in the wrong direction, even as 88 percent describe the national economy as bad, while another 74 percent say their personal living conditions are poor.

“These are not abstract statistics, they are the voices of a population under intense economic pressure.”

The party spokesman further said there is mounting evidence of widespread deprivation, claiming that a large majority of Nigerians report going without basic necessities such as food, clean water, medical care, cooking fuel, and even cash income at different times during the past year.

“For millions of households, economic hardship is no longer a temporary difficulty, it has become daily reality. This is what happens when government is more concerned with external validation than the well-being of its own people.

“The African Democratic Congress believes that the standard measure of any economic policy is whether it has made life better for the majority of citizens and protected the most vulnerable. On this score, the APC government has failed,” the ADC said.