The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has said that the October 2025 World Bank report showing that 139 million Nigerians now live below the poverty line accurately reflects the true condition of the nation’s economy.
In a statement signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party accused the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of manipulating statistics to create a false impression of economic progress.
The ADC described the latest poverty figure as a 61 per cent increase from the 81 million Nigerians recorded in 2019, saying it was clear evidence that the administration’s economic policies had worsened living conditions despite official claims of improvement.
According to the statement, the report exposed “the wide gap between the government’s rhetoric of economic progress and the harsh realities faced by millions of citizens.”
“While the APC administration celebrates increased revenue and boasts of meeting fiscal targets, more Nigerians are slipping into abject poverty at a rate never seen before in our history,” the ADC said.
The party further accused the government of using “creative statistics” to conceal its domestic economic failures. “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,” it stated.
The ADC also referenced President Tinubu’s Independence Day address, in which he declared that “the worst is over,” describing the remark as “a calculated whitewash designed to sustain a false 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 opposition party lamented the skyrocketing food inflation, noting that the price of a bag of rice has increased fivefold in the past four years, further deepening hardship for ordinary Nigerians.
