The new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that 62 per cent of Nigerians will be living in poverty by 2026. To the detached observer this may read like another sterile economic statistic, a line on a graph, a future risk that can be debated in conferences and policy seminars. But to anyone who lives inside the fragile and exhausting reality of Nigerian life, the projection feels less like data and more like destiny – a destiny scripted by a governing elite that has, over decades, perfected the conversion of public wealth into private comfort while leaving citizens to fend for themselves in a marketplace of uncertainty and despair.
The tragedy of Nigeria is not that we are poor. It is that we have been made poor – deliberately, structurally, and persistently. Poverty here is not an unfortunate accident. It is the predictable consequence of a political economy that prioritises extraction over production, patronage over competence, spectacle over service, and propaganda over truth. PwC’s projection is therefore not a warning about the future. It is a diagnosis of the present: a country already deeply wounded by inequality is being asked to endure another decade of pain while its leaders continue to market cosmetic success.
For years, government actors have assured the nation that millions have been “lifted out of poverty” through social intervention programmes. The phrase has become a mantra repeated without irony, even as hunger expands like an oil spill through communities. But if millions have been lifted out of poverty, why does the poverty rate continue to rise? Why does every market visit feel like a referendum on survival? Why do salaries vanish long before basic needs are met? Why do parents now divide meals into fractions just to stretch the week? The contradiction is glaring. Either the statistics are wrong, or the story being told is false. PwC’s sober analysis suggests the latter.
Inflation is often spoken of as an abstract economic force, but in Nigeria it functions as a quiet predator. It stalks homes invisibly, eroding dignity in tiny daily humiliations: the portion of food that becomes smaller, the medicine that must wait till next month, the school fees that suddenly transform from achievable goal into impossible mountain. Real income – that is, the purchasing power of wages – has collapsed. A salary today buys less food, less transport, less electricity, less safety, less hope. Yet the architects of policy continue to insist that reforms are “necessary pains” on the path to national renewal. Pain for whom? Sacrifice by whom? Renewal for whose benefit?
Here lies the doctrinal heart of the crisis. Nigeria operates on an unwritten social theology in which the poor are expected to suffer quietly, while the rich are permitted to flourish loudly. When subsidies are removed, the poor must tighten their belts. When the currency is floated, the poor must be patient. When tariffs rise, the poor must learn resilience. But when the poor demand living wages, affordable food, functioning public services, or even the simple assurance that they will not starve, the conversation suddenly shifts to budget constraints and national sacrifice. The poor become both the moral burden-bearers and the political scapegoats of a system that neither protects nor respects them.
This is why it is essential to insist that poverty in Nigeria is not only economic; it is ideological. It is the product of a worldview in which public policy is designed around the convenience of the powerful rather than the survival of the vulnerable. It is the outcome of institutions hollowed out by corruption, weakened by incompetence, and disabled by patronage. It is the harvest of decades of underinvestment in health, education, housing, social protection, labour justice and rural economies – the very pillars through which societies protect citizens from the sharp edges of misfortune.
Under such circumstances, it becomes dishonest – even cruel – to celebrate marginal macroeconomic adjustments while ignoring the devastation at the household level. Growth that does not lift people into dignity is not progress; it is gentrified suffering. Stability that coexists with mass hunger is not stability; it is organised neglect. A state that cannot ensure the basic welfare of its people has surrendered the moral legitimacy upon which democratic governance rests.
There is also a deeper political dimension that must be named clearly: poverty concentrates power. A people trapped in daily economic struggle are easier to manipulate, easier to bargain with, easier to silence. When the price of rice becomes the central political question in a household, constitutional rights become distant luxuries. Votes can be bought with crumbs because bellies have already been emptied. Anger may exist, but it is domesticated by exhaustion. This is not accidental. A ruling elite that feared an empowered citizenry would invest in universal education, liveable wages, strong unions, and accountable governance. A ruling elite that benefits from political docility does the opposite.
The moral consequence of this arrangement is devastating. Nigeria is slowly being transformed into a country where deprivation is normalised, where citizens internalise hardship as a natural condition rather than a structural injustice. Children grow up believing that constant struggle is the default setting of life. Young people adjust their dreams downward to fit the limits of the economy. Adults wander between resilience and resignation. This quiet defeat is more dangerous than protest, because it corrodes hope at the roots.
To speak doctrinally about poverty is to say that poverty is violence. It is the slow, grinding violence that denies children nutrition, denies the sick medicine, denies workers dignity, denies students opportunity, and denies families rest. It shortens lives, diminishes potential, and suffocates possibility. When a state presides over the mass production of poverty, it is participating in a sustained act of structural aggression against its own people.
What, then, is the alternative? The alternative begins with truth. A nation cannot heal from wounds it refuses to acknowledge. Nigerians deserve leaders who will admit that poverty has deepened, that social protections have failed, that inequality is immoral, and that policy must be radically re-imagined around the welfare of the majority rather than the comfort of the few. Social justice is not a slogan; it is a re-ordering of priorities. It is the insistence that budgets are moral documents reflecting whose lives deserve protection. It is the recognition that democracy without dignity is simply a sophisticated form of suffering.
PwC’s projection that 62 per cent of Nigerians may soon be poor should not be read as prophecy. It should be read as indictment. It indicts the complacency of leaders who mistake noise for governance. It indicts a political culture that treats public office as private inheritance. It indicts a national imagination that has grown comfortable with mediocrity. But it also calls citizens, activists, workers, scholars, faith leaders and the young to articulate a different moral vision for the country – one in which dignity is the organising principle of public life.
Because poverty is not our identity. It is the evidence of a broken social order – and broken orders can be rebuilt. But they are not rebuilt through denial, tokenism, or public relations storytelling. They are rebuilt through courage, justice, solidarity, and the disciplined refusal to accept that mass suffering is inevitable.
PwC has told us what will happen if nothing changes. The real question is whether we will finally insist on something better – not as charity, not as favour, but as the inalienable right of every human being who calls this country home.