Nigeria Democratic Congress presidential candidate Peter Obi has condemned President Bola Tinubu’s remark to Catholic bishops that hunger has always existed in Nigeria as insensitive, citing figures showing food insecurity has doubled to 35 million Nigerians and extreme poverty has risen from 87 million to nearly 140 million since 2023.
President Tinubu told Catholic bishops hunger has always been with us. Peter Obi says that is not the point — and the numbers prove it.
The NDC presidential candidate fired back on Friday at Tinubu’s recent comments to visiting Catholic bishops, in which the president suggested that hunger predated his birth and was not a new Nigerian phenomenon. Obi acknowledged the historical truth of that statement but argued it completely missed the scale of the current crisis.
“While it is true that hunger has been a part of human life and has existed in our country for decades, such a statement appears insensitive to the plight of the millions of Nigerians who face worsening economic hardship today,” Obi said in a statement, as reported by Vanguard.
The former Anambra governor went straight to the data. He stated that approximately 17 million Nigerians faced acute food insecurity before the Tinubu administration took office in 2023 — a figure he said has now surged to around 35 million. On poverty, he claimed the number of Nigerians living in extreme poverty had climbed from an estimated 87 million in 2023 to nearly 140 million.
“Instead of improving the situation, the crisis has worsened significantly under the current administration,” he stated bluntly.
Obi acknowledged that the administration inherited significant economic and security challenges but was unsparing in his assessment of the response. “Leadership is measured not by the challenges inherited but by the results achieved. The government must honestly acknowledge that its response has fallen far short of what the situation demanded, with millions more Nigerians pushed deeper into poverty and hunger,” he said.
He attributed the deterioration to persistent insecurity, poor economic management, fiscal indiscipline, wasteful public spending and insufficient investment in productive sectors, and called on the Federal Government to prioritise education, healthcare, agriculture, security and small business support as the pathway out of the crisis.
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