82.9 Million Nigerians Live In Poverty – NBS

 Forty percent of people in Nigeria live in poverty, figures published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Monday showed.

In a report about poverty and inequality from September 2018 to October 2019, NBS said 40% of people in Nigeria  lived below its poverty line of 137,430 naira ($381.75) per year.  It said that it represented 82.9 million people.

“In Nigeria 40.1 percent of the total population were classified as poor. In other words, on average 4 out of 10 individuals in Nigeria has real per capita expenditures below 137,430 Naira per year,” NBS added..

Reuters reports that the statistics office said it did not include Borno, the state worst hit by the decade-long Boko Haram insurgency, because many areas there were not safe to reach.

A total of nearly 8 million people need humanitarian assistance across Borno and two neighbouring states affected by the insurgency, according to the United Nations.

The NBS said it had changed its methodology for its study, so the figures could not be compared with previous reports on the same subject covering 2003-2004 and 2009-2010.

“The 2019 study is accordingly treated as a base study and any comparisons with previous poverty studies should be treated with caution,” stated the report.

The statistics office said 52% of people in rural areas live in poverty, compared with 18% in urban parts of the country.

It said the highest poverty levels were in the northwestern state of Sokoto, where 87.7% of people lived under the poverty line compared with 4.5% in commercial hub Lagos state which had the lowest rate.