The All Progressives Congress presidential campaign council has said that the recent report of 133million poor Nigerians is still one of the lowest in the West African sub-region.
The APC council added that the states with heightening poverty in the country are states controlled by the opposition party, while listing Sokoto and Bayelsa.
The APC campaign council Director of Media and Publicity, Bayo Onanuga, stated this in an interview with PUNCH, while claiming that the APC government had not disappointed Nigerians as widely perceived.
He said, “The manifesto the party used to come to power in 2015 is right there. I agree that the APC made some promises. This social investment is one of them too. The party said it would fight corruption. Is the government still not fighting corruption now? The APC government has also been doing certain things concerning unemployment in the country. They create new jobs, offer training facilities to young entrepreneurs and many others.
“I suggest you journalists should read that report again. When the NBS, World Bank and other international institutions are talking about poverty, they keep shifting the goal post. The initial assumption is that if you are earning below one dollar a day, you are poor. Now, they have shifted it to about two dollars or more a day. What the NBS is talking about is multidimensional poverty.
“It also talked about improvement in the monetary side of the report. What this means is that 40 per cent of Nigerians are poor if you use money as an index. But when you apply a multidimensional aspect to it, the figure will shoot up. Don’t let us fool ourselves, Nigeria is a very poor country. If you go by all the global statistics on per capita income, ours is one of the lowest even in West Africa.
“So when they are talking about 133 million Nigerians are suffering from multidimensional poverty, it includes housing, access to health facilities, education, transport and others. I can even tell you categorically that the NBS underestimated it.”
