Resign Rather Than Seek Re-election – ADC Fires Tinubu Over New Poverty Figures

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has called on President Bola Tinubu to consider resigning instead of seeking re-election.

POLITICS NIGERIA reports that the remark follows the release of new World Bank figures showing that about 139 million Nigerians now live below the national poverty line.

The opposition party, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, said the latest poverty figures reflected the failure of the Tinubu administration’s economic policies. It argued that the government’s repeated celebration of improved macroeconomic indicators had not translated into better living conditions for ordinary Nigerians.

The ADC said it was deeply disturbed by the World Bank report indicating that about 60 per cent of Nigeria’s population now lives below the national poverty line, describing the situation as the inevitable outcome of policies that “have favoured money over people and statistics over survival.”

According to the party, “The ADC has repeatedly warned that the economic growth, increased revenue, and rising foreign reserves that the Tinubu-led APC government continues to celebrate are meaningless if they do not translate into better lives for the people or protect their livelihoods.”

The party accused the Federal Government of refusing to change direction despite worsening hardship across the country.

“Instead of changing course, the government has stubbornly stuck with its ruinous economic policies and even continues to market recklessness as courage and wickedness as ‘necessary pains,’” the statement said.

The ADC further declared that the latest World Bank figures amounted to a poor performance record for the President.

“However, three years down the line, it is now clear that the chicken has come home to roost. The evidence of 139 million people living in poverty and 17 million at the risk of starvation is President Tinubu’s scorecard. On account of this catastrophic failure alone, President Tinubu should be contemplating resigning from office rather than seeking re-election.”

The party insisted that Nigeria needed a government that genuinely cared about the welfare of its citizens, arguing that the success of any economic policy should be measured by improvements in the lives of the people rather than favourable statistics.

It also criticised the government’s reliance on palliative programmes, saying poverty could not be solved through temporary interventions.

“This is why the ADC rejects the cycle of temporary interventions and emergency responses that has come to define the APC’s economic policies in the name of social intervention programmes. Poverty cannot be defeated through palliatives. It can only be defeated by building an economy that enables Nigerians to produce more food, earn decent incomes, and live with dignity,” the statement added.

The party said an ADC government would focus on structural reforms aimed at reducing energy costs, improving security in farming communities, rehabilitating Nigeria’s 264 abandoned dams to boost irrigation, increasing domestic food production, strengthening agricultural value chains, and investing in education, healthcare and skills development.

It added, “The choice before Nigeria is no longer between competing economic theories. It is between an economy that produces impressive government statistics and one that produces better lives for Nigerians.”

The party said, “Hunger is the most honest measure of economic performance because it cannot be manipulated. Until fewer Nigerians go to bed hungry, until poverty begins to fall instead of rise, and until every Nigerian family can once again afford three decent meals a day, every claim of economic success will remain unrecognisable to the people whose lives those policies are supposed to improve.”

The statement followed the release of the World Bank’s Country Partnership Framework for Nigeria covering 2026 to 2032, which found that about 61 per cent of Nigerians now live below the poverty line, while 33 per cent are classified as ultra-poor and unable to meet their minimum food requirements.

The report acknowledged that President Tinubu’s economic reforms, including the removal of fuel subsidy, foreign exchange reforms and tighter monetary policies, had improved macroeconomic indicators such as economic growth, foreign reserves and investor confidence.

However, the World Bank said the benefits of those reforms had yet to significantly improve the living standards of most Nigerians, noting that high inflation continued to erode household incomes and that social protection measures had been slow and uneven. President Tinubu has consistently defended the reforms, maintaining that they are necessary to place the economy on a path of sustainable growth despite the short-term hardship they have caused.