63% poverty is your scorecard’ – ADC fires at Tinubu government

63% poverty is your scorecard’ – ADC fires at Tinubu government

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has described recent reports that Nigeria’s poverty rate rose to 63% after the removal of petrol subsidies as President Bola Tinubu’s real scorecard and consequence of his ill-defined neoliberal economic policies.

In a statement signed by its national publicity secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party 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 previous polls indicating deep public dissatisfaction with the direction the country is taking under the APC administration.

The full statement read:

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) sees the latest report that Nigeria’s poverty rate has risen to 63% following President Tinubu’s removal of petrol subsidies three years ago as a damning verdict on the administration’s economic policies. However, this report only confirms what millions of Nigerians already know from their daily experience: the cost of living is rising rapidly, purchasing power is plummeting, and families across the country are being pushed deeper into hardship.

The report, presented at a policy dialogue in Abuja on Thursday, indicated that poverty in Nigeria rose sharply from around 50% before the removal of subsidies to 63% after, as rising fuel and transport costs spread through the economy and pushed up the prices of food, transport and other basic goods. This verdict reflects the real consequences of the APC government’s hasty removal of fuel subsidies, without giving full consideration to the impact such a grave decision would have on the lives of ordinary citizens.

The government has repeatedly justified the removal of subsidies by the need to divert resources to areas of critical need, including health and education. Three years later, none of these sectors are better funded, and citizens have not seen the benefits of eliminating subsidies.

Independent polls already show that 93% of Nigerians believe that under President Tinubu the country is going in the wrong direction, even as 88% describe the national economy as terrible, while another 74% say their personal living conditions are terrible. These are not abstract statistics, they are the voices of a population under intense economic pressure.

There is also growing evidence of widespread deprivation. The vast majority of Nigerians report going without basic necessities such as food, clean water, medical care, cooking fuel and even cash income at various times over the past year. For millions of families, economic difficulties are no longer a temporary difficulty, but have become a daily reality. This is what happens when the government is more interested in external validation than the well-being of its own population.

The African Democratic Congress believes that the standard measure of any economic policy is whether it has improved the lives of the majority of citizens and protected the most vulnerable. The APC government has failed on this point.