By Otunba Rotimi
There is a frightening report that has just been updated, and it’s contents are as sorrowful as they are sobering. It is a report that finally given a statistical validation to what majority of Nigerians have been complaining about in the markets, parks, streets, places of worship and at homes. According to the latest findings of the United Nations Development Programme in collaboration with Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford, Nigeria has tragically emerged as the world’s headquarters of multidimensional Poverty phenomenon under the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The report, which depicts the 2026 update of the World’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, revealed with painful clarity that Nigeria’s descent in extreme poverty was not only real but unprecedented among nations evaluated in the period under review. It was also reported that Multidimensional Poverty increased in only five countries in the world, namely Nigeria, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Kyrgyzstan and Gunea. Of these five nations, Nigeria recorded the highest increase, a distinction that is as shameful as it is heartbreaking.
It was further reported that Nigeria’s Multidimensional Poverty Level rose from 33% in 2021 during the twilight of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to 38.7% in 2024 after President Tinubu assumed office. This represents a staggering reversal of gains painstakingly recorded in the previous decade, when the Country had made a significant progress in reducing the phenomenon of Multidimensional Poverty. The report noted that Nigeria is now among the Countries where earlier progress has reversed, with both Poverty rate and the number of people living in Multidimensional Poverty increasing in the 2020s. f61f727b
What makes this report particularly destitution is its true definition of Multidimensional Poverty means. According to the UNDP, Multidimensional Poverty represents not only the lack of income but also the deprivation of good life based on indices such as education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation and accessibility to basic services. In other words, this not merely about whether his child can go to school, whether his family can access health care, whether his home has electricity, whether household can afford basic nutrition, whether he lives affluence or in squalor. f61f
The report found out that many Nigerians still lacked electricity and that households owns nothing apart from necessities such as only one television, only one mobile phone, bicycle or motor cycle evidencing a dimension of Poverty. It was explicitly stated that the household does not own more than one of these assets. This clinical description of a people who have been reduced to the bearest minimum of human existence.
The global picture painted by the report is even more reprehensible. It was manifested that the number of people living under the vicious cycle of Multidimensional Poverty worldwide has increased from 51.5 million to 1.2 billion, marking the first increase since the world’s index was launched in 2010. The UNDP Administrator, Alexander De Croo, was quoted as describing the increase as an admonishment that requires renewed global action, lamenting that behind these figures are 1.2 billion people confronting hardships that reinforce one another: hunger, starvation, insecurity, school drop outs and lack of clean water. More than half of those affected, or 617 million, are children, while 83% live in rural areas. 727b
For Nigeria, the situation is compounded by the paradox of a government that is richer than ever while its people grow poorer. The report contextualised that removal of fuel subsidy has driven the majority of already struggling Nigerians into destitution. President Tinubu’s naira devaluation and after float, which allowed market forces of demand and supply to determine the foreign exchange rates, caused the naira to free-fall into dire straits and trade above N1,000 to a dollar for the first time. f61f
This analysis aligns with the findings of other reputable global institutions. The World Bank, in its newly approved Country Partnership Framework for Nigeria covering 2026 to 2032, revealed that about 79% of the Nigerians remain poor or vulnerable to falling Poverty in spite of the fact that almost three years of sweeping economic reforms. The Bretton Woods institution noted that 61% of Nigerians currently live below poverty trend, while 33% are categorised as ultra poor and unable to meet up the standard minimum necessities required for daily needs.
The International Monetary Fund corroborated this languishing reality in its 2026 Article IV Consultation on Nigeria.
The IMF acknowledged that reforms have strengthened economic stability and built resilience, but warned that conditions for many Nigerians remain difficult, with Poverty climbing to 63% of the population based on the national Poverty line, while an estimated 27 million Nigerians experienced food insecurity. It was reported that the Nigerian Poverty level climbed to 46%, with an estimated 104 million Nigerians living below poverty trend, while headline inflation increased from from 22.4% in May 2023 to 34.8% in December 2024, with food inflation hitting 39.9%, the highest in decades. f38d
The sorrowful irony is that while government accounts swelled with unprecedented fiscal windfall, household accounts emptied. It was documented that Nigeria’s Revenue Service collected N28.3 trillion in 2025, surpassing its target by 12% with monthly revenue jumping from N711 billion in May 2023 to N3.6 trillion in September 2025. The removal petroleum subsidy alone mobilised N15.8 trillion between June 2023 and December 2025. In aggregate, the federal government gained N20.4 trillion in incremental resources over the period. Yet this macroeconomic progress was paired with mas impoverishment, a disconnect that defines the Mr Tinubu’s Presidency.
What we are witnessing, therefore, is not justa statistical anomaly. It is a human catastrophe, artificially inseminated into our economy by a cocktail of ill – conceived policies implemented without empathy. It is a nation where children hawks in traffic instead of learning in classrooms, where mothers are forced to choose between school fees and food, where graduates roam the streets with certificates that have almost become mere papers, where small and medium scale enterprises that are the bedrock of developing economy are facing extinction.
History will record that at a time when Zambia, Egypt, Nepal, Angola and Tajikistan recorded significant reductions in their Poverty level, Nigeria, a nation blessed absolute human and natural resources chose the path that led it to the summit of global poverty. This is the painful reality that confront us as rogue if not most corrupt nation on planet, and it requires not denial or propaganda, but sincere introspection.
For people who have endured so much Poverty, hunger, starvation and chronic inflationary situations due to illicit removal of subsidy on petroleum product, the ballot remains the last hope for saving the economy of the brink of total destruction.
Any irresponsible government that inflicts this level of hardship and expects to be rewarded with continuity lives in illusion. The final decision of the masses will be as definitive as the decision of the UNDP report.
