63 Percent Poor in a Country Drowning in Oil: Nigeria’s Greatest Contradiction

My Thoughts Have No Filter By Abdul’Azeez Bello

0805 113 0075 (WhatsApp) | omobolajibello@gmail.com

Owó ń sàn, àwon omo ń jiyà. The Money Flows, The Children Suffer.

There is a Yoruba proverb that says the child of a fisherman still dies of thirst. In other words, abundance at the top means nothing if it never reaches the bottom.

Welcome to Nigeria in 2026.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited generated N60.517 trillion in revenue in 2025 alone. It posted a profit after tax of N5.76 trillion for the year. Nigeria’s oil production hit a five year high. The Dangote Refinery is online. The giant of Africa is pumping crude and counting Naira. And yet.

Poverty in Nigeria rose to 63 percent in 2025, equivalent to about 140 million people living below the poverty line.

One hundred and forty million human beings. In one country. Below the poverty line. While the oil flow, hah!

If that does not make you stop and stare at the blank wall for a few minutes, I do not know what will.

Let Me Break This Down So Nobody Can Pretend They Don’t Understand

I want to make sure we are all looking at the same picture here because numbers have a way of hiding behind themselves until someone explains them plainly.

The share of Nigerians living below the poverty line increased from 56 percent in 2023 to 61 percent in 2024, before rising further to 63 percent in 2025.

That is not a dip. That is not a bad quarter. That is a steady, consistent, year-on-year march deeper into poverty. Three years in a row. Getting worse every single time.

Headline inflation fell from 34.8 percent in December 2024 to 15.15 percent in December 2025. Food inflation also declined sharply. And yet the World Bank noted that household incomes have not grown fast enough to offset still-elevated inflation, and poverty has yet to begin declining.

So, inflation came down and poverty still went up. Let that arrange itself in your mind slowly. The government celebrates falling inflation like a footballer who scores an own goal and then argues about the technique.

Meanwhile NNPC was pumping 1.54 million barrels per day in December 2025, sitting on N60 trillion in revenue for the year. The oil is real. The money is real. The poverty is also very real. The question that nobody wants to answer is: where exactly is the connection between the first two and the third?

Follow the Money. I Dare You.

Eni tí ó bá fé mo ibi tí owó ń lo, kò tèlé owó. If you want to know where the money goes, follow it.

Don’t let us get lost in the numbers because that is exactly what they want. They hide corruption behind spreadsheets knowing that the moment they throw enough figures at you, your eyes glaze over and you go back to your generator and your garri.

Here is what I know and what every Nigerian who has ever stood in a public hospital without drugs, driven on a poorly constructed/maintained road, or sat in a classroom with a leaking roof knows.

The money is there. It has always been there. What is not there is the will to spend it for the benefit of the greater majority.

E ma binu (Don’t be offended) But somebody must say it. We are not disputing operational needs for new and qualitative vehicles/equipment.

We are disputing SUV replacements in a country where ambulances do not have fuel. We are disputing allowances, in a country where teachers, doctors and other essential service providers are not paid living wages. We are disputing international trips to conferences about poverty, taken in business class of choice airlines.

That is what we are disputing.

The oil money did not disappear into thin air. It disappeared into a system that was designed, carefully and deliberately, to take care of itself first and the Nigerian people last, if at all.

A Former Petroleum Minister. A London Trial. And the Verdict That Made Nigeria Cry.

Here is a story that tells you everything you need to know about how this country’s oil money moves.

A former Nigerian Petroleum Resources Minister stood trial in London in 2026, accused by British prosecutors of receiving what they described as a life of luxury, funded by oil and gas industry figures seeking lucrative contracts in Nigeria. Among the allegations were 100,000 pounds in cash, chauffeur driven cars, private jet flights, refurbishment and staff costs at London properties, school fees for a child, and luxury goods from stores including Harrods and Louis Vuitton. One businessman alone was alleged to have spent more than 2 million pounds at Harrods on her behalf.

Two million pounds. At Harrods. Allegedly from Nigeria’s oil sector. While Nigerians were managing with generators and buying garri in small measures.

The five- month trial at Southwark Crown Court concluded with the former minister being found not guilty on all six counts, collapsing a thirteen-year investigation by the UK’s National Crime Agency.

Thirteen years of investigation. Five months of trial. Acquitted. And that, as my people say, is where the matter pain us pass.

Because here is the real story. Whether guilty or not guilty in a foreign court, the allegations themselves tell you exactly how Nigeria’s oil wealth has historically been treated by those entrusted to manage it. Private jets. London properties. Designer stores. School fees abroad. All allegedly flowed from an oil sector that belongs to 220 million Nigerians who cannot afford three meals a day.

And she is just the one whose name ended up in a London courtroom. How many more are sitting rosy locations right now, comfortable, untroubled and completely untouched? The oil money left Nigeria. Whether through proven corruption or unprovable allegations, it found its way to foreign luxury. That part, nobody is disputing.

The Budget That Confesses Everything

The National Assembly spent N110 billion on vehicles and allowances for lawmakers in 2025. In June 2026, the Federal High Court in Lagos declared this expenditure unlawful, with Justice Yellim Bogoro ruling that the spending violated procurement laws and constitutional provisions.

A court declared it unlawful. The money has already spent. The vehicles are already parked in different compounds. Justice arrived late, as it always does in Nigeria, after the feast, to count the empty plates.

A commission was inaugurated in February 2025 to develop the Northwest, one of Nigeria’s most impoverished regions. Months later it had yet to deliver any visible project. But N943 million had already been spent on board members’ allowances.

A development commission that has not developed anything. But the board members are very well paid! This is the Nigerian system in a single paragraph. You set up a body to help poor people. The body itself becomes the beneficiary. The poor people wait!

The People at the Bottom Are Not Invisible. They Are Just Inconvenience.

Let me bring this off the spreadsheet and back to the street where lives are booming in disguise.

The 140 million Nigerians below the poverty line are not statistics. They are the woman selling ogi (kunu) and akara (kosai) by the roadside at 6am in January because that is the only heat she and her children will feel today. They are the farmer in Benue who harvested a good crop but cannot get it to market because the transportation (truck) fare has multiplied several folds.

They are not poor because they are lazy. Nigerians are among the hardest working people on earth. They are poor because the system is designed to extract from them, not invest in them.

Every naira stolen from the public treasury is a meal that was never cooked, a drug that was never purchased, a child that went to bed hungry in a country whose oil paid for someone’s luxurious lifestyle. That is not poverty. That is theft wearing a policy document.

The Way Forward

The contradiction between oil wealth and mass poverty is not a mystery. It is a choice. And it can be unchoiced.

Make the oil money traceable and public.

Every naira that flows from NNPC to government accounts must be publicly disclosed in real time. No more quarterly reports that arrive after the money has already moved. Nigerians have a right to see what their oil is earning and where every kobo is going. Transparency is not optional in a democracy. It is the foundation.

Cut the cost of governance drastically and immediately

Political and public office must stop being the most lucrative career in Nigeria. Until and unless costs of governance become less than building public structures, nothing will change.

Invest oil revenue directly in productive sectors.

Agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure and education are the sectors that create real wealth for ordinary Nigerians. Oil money must flow deliberately into these areas with measurable targets and public accountability. The oil will eventually run out. What Nigeria builds with it before that day is all that will remain.

Prosecute corruption at every level and finish what the courts start.

A former petroleum minister trial in London is a reminder that Nigeria’s stolen wealth does not disappear. It sits in foreign bank accounts, antique shops and luxury properties abroad. Nigeria must aggressively pursue asset recovery, strengthen the EFCC and ICPC with genuine independence and ensure that every conviction is followed by real consequences, not plea bargains and quiet settlements.

Protect the poor while the reforms take hold.

The World Bank warned that even with projected improvement, poverty will decline slowly due to weak job creation, low agricultural productivity and persistent inequality. In the meantime, targeted cash transfers, food security programmes and affordable healthcare must reach the people who are suffering now, not in 2029-99 projections.

The Verdict

Òtító tí a bá kò láti so yóó pa wá. The truth we refuse to speak will kill us.

So let me speak it plainly.

Nigeria is not a poor country. Nigeria is a country whose wealth has been systematically stolen, mismanaged and misdirected by people who were entrusted with protecting it. The 140 million Nigerians living below the poverty line are not the consequence of bad luck or limited resources. They are the consequence of deliberate choices made by people who chose themselves over the people they had sworn to serve.

Poverty rose to 63 percent in 2025 even as inflation began to ease. Even when the macro numbers improve, the ordinary Nigerian does not feel it. Because the system is not built to carry improvement downward. It is built to carry wealth upward.

If that is not a confession, I do not know what a confession looks like.

The fisherman’s child does not have to keep dying of thirst. But somebody has to stop drinking the water first.

Abdul’Azeez Bello is just a Nigerian who decided to write what he sees. Through My Thoughts Have No Filter, he says out loud what many think but never get to say. No big grammar. No hidden agenda. Just plain truth.