How Statistics Show This Year May Be Nigeria’s Worst Poverty Crisis Yet — And Why Leadership Matters

By Suleiman Adamu

Nigeria is at a breaking point. For the first time in decades, the numbers are not just bad — they are historic. According to the World Bank’s latest Nigeria Development Update, poverty in the country rose to 63% in 2025, translating to about 140 million people living below the poverty line. Projections for 2026 are even starker: the poverty rate is expected to peak at 62% — about 141 million Nigerians.

That is not a marginal increase. It is a collapse.

The scale of the crisis

The trajectory tells the story.

• 2018/19: Poverty stood at 40%, or 81 million people
• 2022/23: It surged to 56%, or 113 million people
• 2024: 61%
• 2025: 63%, about 140 million people
• 2026 projection: 62%, about 141 million people

Between 2019 and 2023 alone, average consumption per person fell by 6.7%, with urban households hit hardest.

Beyond the headline rate, the depth of deprivation is worsening. The share of “ultra-poor” Nigerians — those unable to afford basic calories even if they spend all their income on food — jumped from 14% in 2019 to 27% in 2023, about 70 million people. Food accounts for up to 70% of total consumption among poorer Nigerians, leaving them brutally exposed to price shocks.

PwC has warned that rising inflation, high interest rates, and naira depreciation could push an additional 13 million Nigerians below the national poverty line. Multidimensional poverty is even worse: the NBS MPI shows about two-thirds of Nigerians are deprived of health care, education, food security and decent employment. In Sokoto, 90.5% of the population is multidimensionally poor.

Put simply: the rate of poverty has never been rising to a magnitude one can never imagine due to bad and weak policies. We are not talking about a slow decline. We are talking about millions falling into poverty every year — about 14 million people fell into poverty between 2023 and 2024 alone.

Why this is happening now

The World Bank points to three drivers: still timid growth, remaining inflationary pressure, particularly from food prices, and weak social protection systems.

But data alone doesn’t explain the pain. Policy choices do.

Growth in Nigeria today is described as “imbalanced, uneven, exclusionary” — driven by services and capital-intensive industries while agriculture and the informal sector, where most Nigerians earn a living, lag behind. When growth bypasses the poor, it ceases to be development and becomes mere arithmetic.

Experts also cite structural neglect and a governance culture that prioritizes access to state resources over delivery of public goods. At the same time, public debt climbed to N159.28 trillion by December 31, 2025, with the IMF warning that fiscal adjustment could force cuts to health, education, and social protection — the very things that keep people from falling further.

A personal note

I need to be honest here: I participated in the emergence of this government with my resources, effort and influence thinking they were for real and will bring change to Nigeria.

Like many Nigerians, I believed. I believed that competence would matter more than connections. That policies would be built around data, not optics. That the economy would work for the market woman in Onitsha, the farmer in Kaduna, the graduate in Lagos — not just for a few.

The numbers today tell a different story. When 141 million people are projected to be poor next year, and when poverty is accelerating instead of stabilizing, hope is not enough. We must confront what went wrong.

What this means for all of us

Poverty at this scale is not just an economic problem. It is a security problem, a health problem, and a democracy problem. The World Bank notes that household incomes have not grown fast enough to offset still-elevated inflation, and poverty has yet to begin declining. A larger share of the population struggling to meet basic needs weakens domestic consumption, limits productivity, and strains public finances.

The political response so far has been dismissive. Officials have called credible data “unrealistic” and asked that it be “properly contextualised”. But denial will not erase hunger, nor will spin put food on the table.

The path forward

If there is any lesson in these statistics, it is this: bad leadership has a cost, and Nigerians are paying it. The precedents we tolerate today in economic management, in social protection, in accountability — become the standard we all live under tomorrow.

We need urgent, honest interventions:

1. Targeted social protection that actually reaches rural and northern communities where hardship is deepest
2. Policy coherence that links growth to jobs in agriculture and the informal economy
3. Fiscal responsibility that protects essential services instead of cutting them

Nigeria has survived hard times before. But we have never faced a moment where so many people were pushed to the edge, so quickly. The data is clear. The question now is whether leadership will match the scale of the crisis.