Hunger Is Older Than the President. That Was Never the Question. By Chidi Eke
Hunger Is Older Than the President. That Was Never the Question.
By Chidi Eke
_Bola Tinubu told the Catholic bishops that hunger existed in Nigeria before he was born. He is right — and it is beside the point. The measurable question is whether hunger deepened under his government. On the evidence, it did — though not by the figure his critics keep repeating_ .
When the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria arrived at the Presidential Villa in late July, they did not come with a theological question. They came with a report: across the country, they told President Bola Tinubu, Nigerians are hungry, insecure, and worn down by an economy that punishes them daily. The President’s reply has since travelled further than anything the bishops said. Hunger, he told them, is not new.
“Before I was born, there was hunger in this country. And I have no control over the population development trajectory of Nigeria.”
He is correct. Hunger did exist in Nigeria before 1952. It existed under colonial rule, under military governments, under every civilian administration since. On the narrow point of fact, the President cannot be contradicted.
But the bishops did not come to Aso Rock to debate the history of hunger. They came to report its present. And there the President performed a quiet substitution — answering a question about now with a fact about then, converting a matter of policy into a matter of permanence. Hunger framed as weather is hunger no one is accountable for. That is the manoeuvre worth examining — because the numbers he skated past are his own government’s.
■ WHAT THE DATA ACTUALLY SAYS
Measured consistently — on the national poverty line that Nigeria’s own Bureau of Statistics uses — the share of Nigerians living in poverty has risen in every year of this administration. It stood at 56.2 percent in 2023, roughly 125.8 million people. It climbed to 61 percent in 2024. By 2025 it reached 63 percent — about 140 million Nigerians. These are not opposition figures. They are the World Bank’s, published in its April 2026 Nigeria Development Update and its 2025 Poverty and Equity Brief, both built on the Bureau’s 2022/23 Living Standards Survey.
The detail the President omitted is the one that convicts the claim of improvement: poverty rose even as inflation fell. Headline inflation dropped from 34.8 percent at the end of 2024 to 15.15 percent a year later — and still the poverty rate went up. Prices slowed; incomes did not recover. The World Bank’s own conclusion is blunt: household incomes have not grown fast enough to offset still-elevated inflation, and poverty has yet to begin declining. “Prosperity on the horizon” is a forecast. The horizon, so far, has not moved.
■ THE PRESIDENT’S STRONGEST DEFENCE
Give the man his due, because accountability that refuses to is just noise. Tinubu inherited a genuinely broken settlement — a petrol subsidy that was fiscally indefensible, a managed exchange rate that had run out of road, debt service swallowing most of federal revenue. The reforms he launched in 2023, painful as they are, are the reforms the World Bank and IMF had urged for years. Front-loaded pain in exchange for later stability is a defensible bet, and no honest observer expects three years to undo three decades. Inherited dysfunction is real, and it should not be erased.
But inheritance and stewardship are two separate ledgers, and leadership is judged on the second. The question is not whether Nigeria was poor when Tinubu took office. It is what happened to that poverty under his policies. The reforms promised a stabilisation that would eventually reach households. At the macro level, stabilisation arrived — inflation cooling, reserves firmer. At the household level, on the government’s own numbers, it has not.
■ WHERE THE CRITICS OVERREACH
Here the Dispatch parts company with the President’s loudest opponents, because they have inflated a real problem into a false one. The figure now in constant circulation — that poverty rose from 87 million in 2023 to 140 million today, “25 million more Nigerians” pushed under — does not survive contact with the data. The 87 million was a World Bank projection made before the Living Standards Survey results were in. Once the survey landed, the Bank revised the 2023 figure sharply upward, to roughly 126 million. Comparing the old low estimate against the new high one manufactures an increase the consistent measure does not show.
Measured like against like, the rise from 2023 to 2025 is about 14 million people and seven percentage points. That is not a rounding error and not a talking point. It is a documented, government-sourced worsening — smaller than the slogan, and far harder to dismiss precisely because it is defensible.
Both things are true at once, and Nigeria is entitled to hear both: hunger did precede this President — and it deepened on his watch. The first fact does not absolve him of the second.
■ THE FACE BEHIND THE NUMBER
The bishops were describing what these figures feel like at ground level. A 50-kilogram bag of local rice that sold for under ₦20,000 in 2022 now costs several times that. According to the Bureau of Statistics, the price of local rice rose 261 percent between early 2023 and 2026; tomatoes, beans, eggs and oil tell the same story. Behind the 140 million is a market woman watching regular customers handle her goods, ask the price, and walk away with nothing — the arithmetic of poverty dressed up as a shopping trip. That is the constituency the bishops came to speak for. They were told hunger is old.
■ THE VERDICT
When a leader answers a report of present suffering by reaching for the permanence of the past, he is not offering an explanation. He is declining to be measured. The bishops asked why Nigerians are hungrier now. The honest answer is not that hunger is older than the President. It is that, by every consistent measure his own government publishes, there are more hungry Nigerians today than on the day he promised there would be fewer.
Chidi Ekeh, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja
