World Bank (WB)

The World Bank projects that 139 million Nigerians will be living in poverty by the end of this year, a nearly 60% increase from 87 million in 2023, when President Bola Tinubu started implementing the reforms it had prescribed on the first day of his term. Promising to slash petrol prices during his election campaign, Tinubu declared in his presidential inaugural speech on May 29, 2023, “the fuel subsidy is gone,” overseeing a petrol price hike of nearly 488% in Africa’s largest producer by October 2024. This also increased the price of electricity multifold because more than 58% of the Nigerian households, left out of the national grid, rely on petrol and diesel generators. With storage capacity and cold-chain logistics limited, a lack of “reliable access to power also leads to high food losses.