In 1996, the World Bank released a prescient report titled “Nigeria – Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: The Challenge of Growth with Inclusion.” It was an indictment cloaked in analysis, a nation rich in oil, land, and human potential had failed to include its people in its so-called progress. Nearly three decades later, that failure has matured into a crisis. The April 24, 2025 report from the World Bank tells the latest chapter of this grim story: Nigeria now accounts for 15 percent of the world’s poorest people.
That is not just a figure; it is a moral crisis. Each unit in that percentage is a human life stripped of options. Behind the metrics are people who live in slums without toilets, children with bellies bloated from malnutrition, and young men whose first taste of state presence is at the end of a police baton, not in a classroom. Poverty in Nigeria is not a silent statistic – it is loud, raw, and ever-present.
We speak often of economic growth, but for whom is this growth? For many Nigerians, prosperity exists only on billboards and campaign slogans. What we have grown is inequality. What we have multiplied is exclusion. Poverty has persisted not because of a lack of programs, but because of a lack of political and structural will to ask hard questions and confront hard truths.
The Leaking Roof: Analogy of a Broken System
Imagine a family living in a house with a leaking roof. Every time it rains, water pours through the ceiling, flooding the rooms. The parents, instead of repairing the roof, place buckets under the leaks. They mop the floor. They move the furniture. They even spend money on air fresheners to mask the mouldy smell. Every rainy season, the same ritual continues. Buckets. Mops. Complaints. No repairs.
This is how Nigeria has dealt with poverty.
Each government rolls out new initiatives – cash transfers, skills training, empowerment schemes – without fixing the structural leak that makes people poor in the first place. We throw money at poverty, but not at the systems that produce it: broken public education, non-existent health care, epileptic electricity, and a jobs pipeline that begins and ends with “connections.” The interventions are like the buckets: temporary, reactive, and ultimately ineffective.
The rain continues to fall, and with climate change, it’s falling harder. Our economic structure is leaking, yet instead of patching the roof, we polish the floors.
Diagnosing Without Bias, Prescribing with Precision
Since 1999, every Nigerian administration has come into office with anti-poverty promises. NAPEP, YOUWIN, SURE-P, N-Power, etc – the alphabet soup of interventions grows thicker by the decade. But the deeper the promises, the shallower the impact. Why? Because, as Dani Rodrik argues, a policy is only as good as its diagnosis. And in Nigeria, we have treated poverty as if it were a standalone disease, instead of a symptom of systemic dysfunction.
The binding constraints are clear. Nigeria’s economy is structurally unjust. It rewards rent-seeking over productivity. It concentrates opportunities at the centre and neglects the periphery. It speaks of youth as “the future” while denying them the skills, networks, and platforms to shape the present. And it treats the poor as data points, not citizens.
The state’s development model continues to prioritize extraction over inclusion. Oil wealth has funded political stability, for elites, not national development. The informal sector, where most poor Nigerians survive, is treated as a tax-avoidance problem, not as a source of innovation and employment. And while we debate fuel subsidies and forex policies in high-level meetings, Rahila in Zamfara still walks three kilometers to fetch dirty water. These are not parallel realities; they are cause and effect.
Politics of Exclusion, Economics of Despair
The political economy of poverty in Nigeria is stubborn because it serves a purpose – for some. Poverty, for many politicians, is useful. It creates dependency. It makes vote-buying cheaper. It reduces political demand and suppresses civic expectations. This is why anti-poverty programs often emerge just before elections, loaded with slogans but emptied of strategy.
Even within well-meaning policies, implementation is often divorced from context. Agricultural interventions, for example, may provide loans or inputs, but ignore the lack of feeder roads or secure land tenure. Skills acquisition centers are built, but without power or markets for the finished goods. These are not design flaws, they are symptoms of a technocratic approach that refuses to grapple with power relations, institutions, and accountability.
Real poverty reduction demands political courage. It requires confronting vested interests that benefit from the status quo. It also demands recognizing that the Nigerian federation, as currently configured, disincentivizes local innovation. States and local governments, closest to the people, remain fiscally handcuffed and administratively dependent. Local governments are treated as pension processing units rather than engines of development.
The Price of Inaction, the Possibility of Change
The tragedy is not that Nigeria is poor. The tragedy is that we have accepted it. Poverty has become normal, even expected. But normal is not natural. Poverty is manufactured. It is sustained by choices – who gets educated, who gets land, who gets contracts, who gets ignored. And like anything built by humans, it can be dismantled by humans.
To do so, we must abandon the comfort of development theatre and embrace the hard work of systemic reform. We must stop chasing donor funding and start building domestic capacity. We must invest in ideas that take longer than electoral cycles, and policies that outlast personalities. Because poverty does not vote, it suffers. It migrates. It rebels. It endures in silence until it erupts in violence.
The World Bank’s warning is not just a diagnostic memo. It is a mirror. And in that mirror, we must confront who we are, who we have failed, and who we still have the chance to save.
What Must Be Done Differently
The first imperative is productivity with dignity. Nigeria’s informal sector must be mainstreamed, not formalized through force, but supported through infrastructure, legal protection, and access to capital. Artisans, market traders, and smallholder farmers are not poor because they lack ambition; they are poor because the state has not built an economy around their reality. Local industrial policies designed and implemented at state level should center small-scale manufacturers, cooperatives, and rural entrepreneurs.
Second, education and health must be restructured as public goods, not budgetary leftovers. A child born in Ekiti and one born in Ebonyi must have equal odds at life, not just equal slogans. That means building schools, yes, but also ensuring teachers are trained, paid, and accountable. It means a primary health care system that doesn’t just exist in line items, but in functional facilities.
Third, the political economy must shift. Developmental federalism should allow states to compete, not beg. Federal transfers must be tied to performance in service delivery, not just population formulas. Local governments must be fiscally autonomous and democratically accountable. Citizens must be empowered through participatory budgeting, town hall forums, and open governance platforms.
Lastly, a social compact must be built. Government cannot continue to demand patriotism from citizens it has not served. A national development charter, crafted not by elites alone, but by farmers, teachers, and youths, can lay the groundwork for a new moral and economic consensus.
We’ve got the edge. Get real-time reports, breaking scoops, and exclusive angles delivered straight to your phone. Don’t settle for stale news. Join LEADERSHIP NEWS on WhatsApp for 24/7 updates →
