October 18, (THEWILL) – Nigeria’s latest economic narrative presents a troubling contradiction: An economy expanding at a faster pace, a government celebrating international validation of its reforms, and a population in which tens of millions remain deprived of basic healthcare, education and acceptable living standards.
Barely hours after President Bola Tinubu welcomed the World Bank’s October 2026 Nigeria Development Update as evidence that his administration’s economic reforms were delivering results, a United Nations report offered a sobering counterpoint.
According to the figures provided in the report, approximately 113 million Nigerians, representing 48.7 per cent of the population covered by the assessment, suffer multidimensional poverty.
The juxtaposition is difficult to ignore. While the World Bank reported that Nigeria’s economy grew by 4.2 percent in the first half of 2026, compared with 3.9 percent in the corresponding period of 2025, the UN figures point to a country where nearly one in every two people faces overlapping deprivations in essential aspects of life.
The World Bank projects that economic growth will average at least 4.4 percent between 2026 and 2028, despite the economic uncertainties associated with the conflict in the Middle East. For the Tinubu administration, the outlook provides grounds for optimism about the direction of the economy and the potential benefits of its reform programme.
Yet, for millions of households struggling with food costs, school expenses, healthcare bills, insecure employment and inadequate infrastructure, such projections may appear remote from their daily realities.
The UN’s 2026 report, jointly produced by the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, reportedly found that the average poor Nigerian experiences deprivation across 55 per cent of the measured health, education and living-standard indicators. It also classified 28.7 percent of the population covered by the assessment as severely poor.
These figures describe a form of poverty that goes beyond insufficient income. A household may suffer because children are out of school, family members cannot obtain adequate healthcare, access to clean cooking fuel or sanitation is limited, or basic housing and other necessities are unavailable. Such disadvantages often reinforce one another, making it harder for families to escape poverty even when economic activity increases.
The scale of deprivation therefore presents a serious challenge to the assumption that improvements in aggregate economic indicators will automatically produce widespread welfare gains.
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GDP measures the value of goods and services produced within an economy over a given period. It does not directly establish how that output is distributed, how many decent jobs are created, whether wages keep pace with essential expenses, or whether citizens can afford the public and private services necessary for a dignified life.
An economy can expand because of stronger output in a limited number of sectors, higher activity among large firms, increased production in capital-intensive industries or improved performance in selected services. Yet those gains may have limited immediate effects on households if employment creation remains weak, productivity gains are concentrated, or the cost of living absorbs additional income.
The central issue is whether Nigeria’s current growth trajectory is sufficiently broad-based, employment-intensive and socially inclusive to improve the welfare of the population. When economic expansion coexists with widespread deprivation, the government must look beyond headline GDP figures and confront the structural weaknesses preventing growth from translating into human development.
Growth becomes meaningful to that household only when it contributes to greater purchasing power, more reliable employment, affordable services and a reasonable prospect of escaping deprivation.
The government must therefore resist the temptation to use GDP growth as a comprehensive verdict on economic wellbeing while the fiscal rascality thrives. Growth is an important indicator of productive activity; it is not a substitute for poverty reduction, employment quality, income distribution or access to essential services.
Another critical area is expenditure efficiency. Nigeria faces not only a revenue challenge but also a spending challenge. Nigeria loses billions of naira annually to inefficiency, duplicated agencies, poorly targeted subsidies and abandoned projects. Fiscal discipline requires the government to obtain greater value from every naira spent.
