Billionaire wealth hits record, fuels political inequality – Oxfam

By Abubakar Yunusa

Billionaire wealth surged to a historic high in 2025, deepening political inequality and economic injustice, a new report by Oxfam has warned.
The report, released on Monday as the World Economic Forum opened in Davos, said global billionaire wealth jumped by more than 16 per cent in 2025 to $18.3tn — three times faster than the average growth recorded over the past five years.
Oxfam said the concentration of wealth is translating into political power, noting that billionaires are about 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens.
The situation is described as more severe in Africa, where the wealth of billionaires grew four times faster in 2025 than in the previous five years combined.
In Nigeria, the report said the rise in billionaire wealth is occurring amid the country’s worst cost-of-living crisis in decades.
It noted that the wealth of African billionaires grew by 36.5 per cent in a single year, twice the global average, citing Nigeria’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, whose fortune rose to $24.8bn.
The report, titled Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power, examined how wealthy elites use political influence to shape economic rules in their favour.
According to Oxfam, Nigeria’s tax system offers a clear example of what it described as “the rule of the rich”, where political connections allow billionaires to avoid the burdens faced by ordinary citizens and small businesses.
A case study in the report alleged that Dangote Cement, despite posting profit margins of 86 per cent, paid an effective tax rate of just two per cent during the period analysed.
Reacting to the findings, the Country Director of Oxfam in Nigeria, Tijani Ahmed Hamza, said the figures showed a broken system.
“While Nigerian small businesses are being choked by multiple taxes and ordinary citizens pay 100 per cent of the price for government failure, the super-rich are paying effectively two per cent,” he said.
“This is not just inequality; it is state capture. When the richest man makes more in a single morning than a worker on minimum wage earns in 35 years yet pays a lower effective tax rate than a teacher or nurse, the system is broken.”
The report also linked the surge in billionaire wealth to Africa’s worsening debt crisis.
It said spending on debt servicing across the continent is now 150 per cent higher than the combined expenditure on education, healthcare and social protection.
Hamza added, “Nigeria is borrowing to pay debts because we refuse to tax the super-rich. We are starving our schools and hospitals to feed our creditors, while granting tax waivers to monopolies already posting record profits.”
Oxfam called for urgent public action, including a National Inequality Reduction Plan to dismantle monopolies, a wealth tax on the super-rich and an end to tax waivers for profitable corporations.
The organisation also urged stronger protections for civil liberties and greater political empowerment for ordinary citizens, civil society groups and trade unions.