In 2015, Nigeria began a spiral into an economic recession after years of economic boom. The boom had created a Nigerian middle class and changed the way the country was viewed by the rest of the world. In the years after, the country has managed to come out of its worst recession on paper, but the effects of this new resurgence has yet to trickle down to the average man, if anything things seem to be getting worse.

Corroborating what the average Nigerian is experiencing on the ground, is a new report by the World Poverty Clock, a non-governmental organisation in Vienna. Funded by the German government and led by Homi Kharas, deputy director of the Brookings Institution in the US, and Wolfgang Fengler, a World Bank lead economist.

The World Poverty Clock is dedicated to monitoring poverty indices and researching ways to reverse poverty in poorer countries. The non-profit has predicted that Nigeria will overcome India by February 2018 as the country with

The federal government has gone to great lengths to disregard the report and all the local pointers that line up with it, simply because the forecast was made by a foreign organisation and it casts the current administration in a negative light. It is unsure if anything tangible will be done to halt the prediction from coming to pass.

This is not the first time the current government has ignored a prediction by an international body, only to act after the prediction has come to pass. Who can forget the federal government’s indifference to the UN report which warned about potential starvation in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Borno and Adamawa. The Federal government did not ask its Emergency Management Agency to step in until the local media reported of the starvation in various IDP camps few months later, long after several hundred women and children had died of starvation.

Whether they actually managed to get the crisis under control is another matter entirely.

The ticking poverty clock which put our rising poverty situation at 5.7 people per minute shows government at all levels need to invest more in poverty alleviation schemes and in addition build a working and all-encompassing economy for all Nigerians.

Also, our Population which is growing at an astronomical rate need to be addressed. The government can do this by embarking on family planning campaigns in conjunction with community and religious leaders in the country.

Editor