NBS’ Claim That More Nigerians Were Poor Under Jonathan Than Buhari 'Absolutely Absurd'

The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, on Monday described as politically tainted and statistically unreliable, unbelievable, untenable, the latest poverty rate of Nigeria as issued by the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, which fixed the current poverty rate at forty per cent.

It dismissed as absolutely absurd, the NBS explanation that a new methodology was adopted in reaching the very recent determination of the estimated percentage of Nigerians that are poor in which case the percentage of poor people in Nigeria when Goodluck Jonathan was President in 2012 was now higher than the statistical data under the Muhammadu Buhari presidency.

HURIWA stated that this was despite “that poverty has grown exponentially and geometrically even by the admissions of President Muhammadu Buhari who stated last year that based on intelligence made available to him that there are 100 million poor Nigerians”. It maintained that nobody needs a statistician to conjure up a magical percentage of the poor that is diametrically opposed to the realities on the ground.

Allnews reports that the executive summary of the 2019 Poverty and Inequality in Nigeria released earlier today by the NBS showed that 40.1 percent of Nigeria’s total population was classified as poor. This translates to over 82.9 million Nigerians who are considered poor by national standards.

The bureau was said to have in 2012 stated that Poverty has risen in Nigeria, with almost 100 million people living on less than a $1 (£0.63) a day. HURIWA quoted the NBS as saying in 2012 thus: "Despite the fact that the Nigerian economy is growing, the proportion of Nigerians living in poverty is increasing every year, although it declined between 1985 and 1992, and between 1996 and 2004".

Now in a statement issued by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, HURIWA believes it is only political statistics that can magically reduce the percentage of poor Nigerians from what it told the nation years back long before Nigeria became the poverty capital of the world thus overtaking India in 2019.

According to the rights group, "How come in 2012, the population of the poor in Nigeria statistically stood at over sixty-one percent as rated by the National Bureau of Statistics at that time that Nigeria is not so much hobbled by massive poverty to a level of becoming the poverty capital of the World and now that even President Muhammadu Buhari stated that there were 100 million poor people in Nigeria only last year only for the National Bureau of Statistics to sit in the air-conditioned offices in the Central Business district in Abuja and in what could be the greatest fallacy of the twenty-first century to state that the nation now has only forty percent of poor people amongst the population of 200 million?”