The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has knocked the President Muhammadu Buhari for the increasing rate of poverty in the country, following a report by the World Bank.
The party made this known on Wednesday in a statement titled, ‘Poverty: World Bank report exposes Buhari presidency, APC’s lies – PDP,’ signed by the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan.
A report by the World Bank on Tuesday had stated that inflation pushed about seven million Nigerians below the poverty line in 2020.
“Although the economy started to grow again, prices are increasing rapidly, severely impacting Nigerian households. As of April 2021, the inflation rate was the highest in four years. Food prices accounted for over 60 per cent of the total increase in inflation,” the report stated.
Reacting, the PDP blamed the APC-led administration for the inflation, calling on the President to work on the economy “before every Nigerian is turned into a street beggar.”
The statement partly read, “It indeed appears that Mr. President enjoys living in denial while watching millions of Nigerians go down in abject poverty, excruciating hunger and starvation as our country now ranks 98th out of 107 in Global Hunger Index under his watch.
“Under President Buhari, Nigerians are now subjected to the worst form of poverty and hardship, with collapsed purchasing power, occasioned by a voodoo economy management that have wrecked our productive sectors and pummelled our naira from the about N167 to a US dollar in 2015 to the current over N500 per dollar.
“It is unfortunate that Mr. President will choose to always bandy fictitious figures and false performance claims, when he has, in a space of six years, destroyed our national productivity and reduced our country to a beggarly nation, a laughing stock and object of pity among the comity of nations.”
