The African Democratic Congress (ADC), has said the October 2025 World Bank report on Nigeria’s economy, which revealed that 139 million Nigerians were living below poverty line reflected the true state of the nation’s economy.
In a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party accused the President Bola Tinubu-led All Progressives Congress (APC) government of peddling deceptive statistics to create a false impression of economic progress.
The ADC described the new poverty figure as a 61 per cent increase from the 81 million recorded in 2019, saying it was clear evidence that the economic policies of the Tinubu administration had plunged more Nigerians into hardship despite government propaganda suggesting otherwise.
According to the statement, the World Bank report exposed “the wide gap between the government’s rhetoric of economic progress and the daily realities faced by millions of Nigerians.
“While the APC administration celebrates increased revenue and boasts of meeting fiscal targets, more citizens are slipping into abject poverty at a rate never seen before in Nigeria,” the statement read.
The ADC further accused the government of masking its domestic economic failures with “creative statistics” that painted a misleading picture of success.
“The World Bank numbers tell a simple but painful story: under the APC and President Bola Tinubu’s government, more Nigerians have fallen into poverty than at any other time in our history. In 2019, four out of ten Nigerians were poor. Today, at least six out of ten are,” the party said.
The ADC, which also recalled that during his Independence Day address, President Tinubu declared that, “the worst is over”, said the World Bank’s report has proven such statements to be “a calculated whitewash designed to sustain the government’s narrative of progress.
“Behind President Tinubu’s shiny statistics are the grim realities of historic human suffering, families skipping meals, children dropping out of school, and households selling assets just to buy food and basic drugs,” the statement added.
The party lamented that under the APC administration, food inflation had skyrocketed, with the price of a bag of rice multiplying fivefold in just four years.
Chuks Okocha
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