Former Statistician-General of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Yemi Kale, has warned that about 89 million Nigerians, or 40% of the population, are trapped below the poverty line.
Kale, now group chief economist at Afreximbank, spoke at The Platform Nigeria’s Independence Day event, themed Rebuilding Our Nation. He described Nigeria as the country with the second-highest number of poor people in the world, after India.
“To grasp the magnitude of this number, we can consider that fewer than 20 of the world’s 195 recognised countries even have a population larger than just Nigeria’s estimated number of poor,” he said.
Kale warned that the numbers are not static. Poverty is deepening, and inequality is stretching the fabric of society. He said this threatens the very meaning of independence, which should guarantee every Nigerian the chance to thrive at home.
According to him, much of the trouble comes from policy missteps and delays in reforms.
“Key adjustments, some finally underway, should have begun over a decade ago, when warning signs were already evident. Acting sooner would have significantly softened the impact on households and businesses, sparing the economy years of compounding fiscal and inflationary pressures. Instead, distortive monetary and exchange rate policies lingered, eroding investor confidence and choking off investment,” Kale explained.
The Pain of Reforms
He acknowledged that recent government reforms — from subsidy removal to exchange rate unification — are painful but insisted they are necessary. “There is really no credible alternative,” he noted.
For Kale, consistency and integrity are the missing pieces in Nigeria’s governance. Reforms, he argued, only work when they are executed with discipline and when citizens trust that leaders are not using them as excuses for corruption.
“The challenge, however, is to ensure that the path of reform is as painless, humane, and well-sequenced as possible,” he said. “But too often in Nigeria this has been overlooked or maybe poorly implemented, resulting in what I think are avoidable hardships.”
He concluded by saying the government’s duty is not to shy away from reforms but to sustain them while urgently strengthening social protections. To him, true economic transformation must be both sound and socially just — otherwise Nigeria risks entrenching poverty for another generation.
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