Former Anambra State Governor and Labour Party presidential candidate in the 2023 elections, Peter Obi, has accused President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of manipulating economic statistics in a bid to mislead Nigerians about the true state of the country’s economy.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Obi criticized the Tinubu administration for what he described as the deliberate use of false data to paint a rosier picture of Nigeria’s deteriorating living conditions.
“In November 2022, while campaigning in Delta State, the then APC Presidential Candidate, Bola Tinubu, now the President, berated the other Presidential Candidate (Peter Obi), he was ashamed to call his name, saying ‘Na statistics we go chop all I want is to put food on the table of Nigerians’.
“Now, 2 years into his 4-year tenure, Nigeria is classified as one of the hungriest nations in the world, with millions of Nigerians not knowing where their next meal will come from.
“President Tinubu is now overfeeding Nigerians with wrong Statistics from wrong unemployment figures, wrong inflation figures, and now GDP debasing, all to put a positive spin on our deteriorating economic and household conditions,” Obi wrote.
The former presidential candidate noted further, “Governance is not a rock science, it’s not a gamble, like I have always reiterated, it requires sincerity of purpose, character, competence, capacity, and compassion.”
What the data says
Obi’s criticism comes amid mixed signals from national and international data sources.
- That means, more than 1 in every 7 of the world’s poorest people lives in Nigeria, raising urgent questions about the country’s development path.
- The World Bank revealed that the region accounted for 80% of the world’s 695 million extremely poor people in 2024.
- Also, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reports that Nigeria’s headline inflation rate eased to 22.22% in June 2025, down from 22.97% recorded in May 2025.
- The data shows that on a year-on-year basis, the headline inflation rate was 11.97% lower than the rate recorded in June 2024, which was at 34.19%.
- The NBS noted that, on a month-on-month basis, the headline inflation rate in June 2025 stood at 1.68%, representing an increase of 0.15 percentage points from the 1.53% recorded in May 2025.
This indicates that the average price level rose at a faster rate in June compared to May 2025.
This is not the first time the former governor is raising concerns about the worsening socio-economic situation in the country.
In April 2025, he said Nigeria has more poor people than China, Indonesia, and Vietnam combined.
