Let’s start with the number the Tinubu administration wants you to remember: 3.87%. That is Nigeria’s real GDP growth for the full year 2025, up from 3.38% in 2024, confirmed by the National Bureau of Statistics on February 27, 2026. In the final quarter alone, the economy expanded by 4.07% — the second time in a decade, excluding the post-pandemic rebound, that quarterly growth crossed the 4% threshold. Finance Minister Wale Edun called it proof of “strengthening macroeconomic stability.” The Federal Ministry of Information issued press releases. The President’s allies held it up as validation.

The number is real. Now here is the other number — the one that puts it in its place.

The World Bank reports that the absolute number of people living in poverty has increased sharply, from about 81 million in 2019 to roughly 139 million in 2025, meaning nearly 62% of the population now lives below the poverty line. The poverty rate is projected to reach 62% in 2026 before stabilising and slightly reducing to 61% in 2027 — the first predicted reversal in nearly a decade.

This is the precise gap that defines Nigeria’s economic moment: a country can post roaring GDP growth while millions of its citizens grow poorer. Nigeria is not a cautionary tale. It is the proof of concept.

To understand how those two numbers — 3.87% growth and 139 million poor — coexist without contradiction, you have to understand what GDP is actually counting.

GDP is the total value of everything produced in a country in a given year. Oil drilled and exported? That counts. A financial services firm turning a profit in Lagos? That counts. A construction company building a government road? That counts. The family in Kano that cannot afford two meals a day? That does not count — not directly.

Nigeria’s nominal GDP stands at approximately $194 billion as of 2025, with GDP per capita at roughly $900–1,000. That per capita figure is the average. Averages lie. The oil sector grew by 6.79% in Q4 2025, with average daily crude production reaching 1.58 million barrels per day. The non-oil sector rose by 3.99%, boosted by agriculture, information and communication, finance, and construction. These are real gains — but notice where they concentrate: oil, telecoms, finance, real estate. Sectors dominated by large firms, capital-intensive operations, and a small slice of the workforce.

A country where a handful of billionaires and a vast sea of the destitute occupy the same economy will produce an average that describes almost nobody’s actual life. The machinery of production is accelerating. The question is who is inside the machine and who is watching from outside.

When President Bola Tinubu took office in May 2023, he made two sweeping decisions within his first hours in power. He removed the fuel subsidy — a decades-old system keeping petrol prices artificially low — and he floated the naira, allowing the exchange rate to find its market level.

The stated logic was defensible. In 2022 alone, Nigeria spent over 4 trillion naira on fuel subsidies — more than was budgeted for capital expenditure — and the subsidy disproportionately benefited the wealthy, encouraged cross-border smuggling, and bred fiscal dependency. Freeing those funds, the argument went, would allow investment in infrastructure and social programs.

What followed was a cost of living crisis of a severity most Nigerians had not seen in a generation. Inflation surged from 22.41% when Tinubu took office to 34.8% by December 2024, with food inflation reaching 40%. The naira fell from ₦460 to the dollar at the time of the 2023 election to just below ₦1,500 — one of the largest currency adjustments of any developing economy in recent years, surpassed only by the Ethiopian birr. Petrol prices quadrupled. Food prices rose more than 80%.

The government promised palliatives. A cash transfer program announced in late 2023 aimed to provide ₦75,000 — roughly $50 — to 15 million households over three months. Implementation faltered severely: the program was suspended in January 2024 amid corruption allegations, and when it resumed in February 2025, coverage remained far below its stated targets. Social protection coverage dropped from 20% of the population in 2019 to just 6% in 2025, with government spending on social safety nets at only 0.14% of GDP — far below the global average of 1.5%.

The Tinubu administration’s defence is not nothing, and it deserves a fair hearing. In February 2026, speaking at an Iftar dinner with lawmakers, the President described the initial backlash as “high voltage” but insisted the reforms were essential to avert deeper fiscal collapse. His Central Bank Governor cited improved fuel availability, a declining inflation trajectory, and foreign reserves now standing at approximately $45 billion.

Some of this holds up. Inflation moderated to 15.15% in December 2025, the softest reading since November 2020, after the statistics office revised its calculation methodology. GDP is growing faster than in the previous two years. The IMF and World Bank both project continued growth of around 4.4% in 2026. The fiscal deficit narrowed significantly following subsidy removal and the naira float. These are verifiable improvements.

But the government has also been selectively truthful about the baseline. In one address, Tinubu claimed the naira traded at ₦1,900 to the dollar when he assumed office — implying it had since strengthened. Fact-checkers noted that on the morning of his inauguration, the naira traded at approximately ₦460.72 in the official market. A government that measures progress from a false baseline is not measuring progress. It is performing it.

The sharpest way to understand Nigeria’s economic reality is to look at the people the headline number skips over entirely.

The share of ultra-poor Nigerians — households unable to meet basic calorie needs even if they spent every naira they had on food — rose from 14% in 2019 to 27% in 2023, roughly 70 million people. Seven out of every ten naira a poor Nigerian earns goes directly to food. Nothing is left for rent, medicine, school, or savings.

Poverty is not evenly distributed. Between 2019 and 2023, average consumption per person fell by nearly 7%, with urban households hit hardest. More than 80% of people in the North-East live below the poverty line, compared with roughly 30% in the South. The wider northern region records poverty rates above 70%, while southern states like Lagos, Rivers, and the FCT benefit from more diversified economies. Nigeria is not one economy. It is several, occupying the same map, bearing the same flag, with profoundly unequal relationships to the growth its government celebrates.

The World Bank has been direct in its October 2025 assessment: sustained implementation of structural reforms and faster expansion of social protection could accelerate growth and reduce poverty — but the real test is whether reforms bring relief to households. That test, nearly three years into the Tinubu administration, is still pending.

Because poor households spend up to 70% of their income on food, the World Bank attributes deepening poverty to a compound of policy choices and structural failures: import bans, high tariffs, fertilizer access constraints, insecurity in food-producing areas, inadequate transport and storage infrastructure, and climate shocks. Some of these were inherited. Some were made worse.

PwC’s Nigeria Economic Outlook 2026, published in January, was equally blunt: slow income growth and high prices are expected to push more people into poverty over the next two years, even as headline inflation moderates. Most Nigerians are unlikely to see income increases that meaningfully offset rising costs in the short term. The macroeconomic stabilisation that the government is correctly celebrating has not yet translated into the microeconomic relief that 139 million people are waiting for.