In a widely circulated statement, Adesina asserted that Nigeria’s GDP per capita had dropped from $1,847 in 1960 to $824 in 2024, painting a grim picture of rising poverty and low human development in Africa’s most populous country.
The Bola Tinubu Presidency has dismissed recent claims by African Development Bank (AfDB) President, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, that Nigerians are economically worse off today than they were in 1960 when the country gained independence.
In a widely circulated statement, Adesina asserted that Nigeria’s GDP per capita had dropped from $1,847 in 1960 to $824 in 2024, painting a grim picture of rising poverty and low human development in Africa’s most populous country.
But in a rebuttal issued Sunday night by Bayo Onanuga, spokesperson for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Presidency said that “Adesina spoke like a politician, in the mould of Peter Obi and did not do due diligence before making his unverifiable statement”.
It accused the outgoing AfDB President of failing to conduct thorough research and relying on faulty statistics.
The Presidency challenged Adesina’s figures, stating that in 1960, Nigeria’s GDP stood at $4.2 billion, with a population of 44.9 million, giving a per capita income of just $93—not the $1,847 cited by the AfDB chief.
Tracing Nigeria’s economic trajectory, the statement highlighted that the country’s GDP only saw significant growth in the 1970s with the oil boom, reaching $164 billion by 1981. It peaked at $3,200 per capita in 2014 after a rebasing exercise.
Onanuga also criticised Adesina’s use of GDP per capita as a sole measure of economic wellbeing.
He argued that the indicator fails to account for wealth distribution, informal economic activity, and other critical factors such as improvements in healthcare, education, and telecommunications.
He said, “Our country’s GDP did not rise remarkably until the 1970s, when crude earnings ballooned. In 1970, our GDP rose to $12.55 billion. In 1975, it was $27.7 billion; $64.2 billion in 1980; and $164 billion in 1981. Up until 1980, per capita income did not exceed $880. It rose to $2187 in 1981 and dropped to $1844 in 1982. In 2014, after rebasing, it reached an all-time high of $3,200.
“These facts raise questions about the source of Dr Adesina’s figures.
“But my mission in this response is not to poke holes in the erudite African banking president’s figures. The more substantive issue lies in Dr. Adesina’s conclusion based on these numbers.
“Dr Adesina should know that GDP per capita is not the only criterion used to determine whether people live better lives now than in the past. Indeed, it is a poor tool for assessing living standards.
“Its primary usefulness is in giving us the metrics to compare economic output in a country or between countries.
“GDP masks many activities in a country’s economy. It neither discloses wealth distribution or income inequality nor accounts for the informal economy, which experts have said is enormous. It does not account for subsistence farming or income transfer from one family member to another.
“GDP per capita is silent on whether Nigerians in 2025 enjoy better access to healthcare, education, and transportation, such as rail and air transport, than in 1960.
“This premise alone suggests why Dr Adesina should not have arrived at his conclusion. Compared with 1960, Nigeria today has more primary, secondary, and tertiary schools. We have more road networks and more medical facilities, private and public.”
The Presidency cited the entry of telecom giants like MTN in the early 2000s—despite initial scepticism based on GDP figures—as evidence that conventional economic metrics often miss the country’s real potential and progress.
“We have phenomenal access to telephones. At Independence, we had 18,724 operational phone lines for a population of about 45 million. Over 200 million Nigerians now enjoy near-universal access to mobile phones and digital services, indicating we are better off today than 65 years ago.”
“No objective observer can claim that Nigeria has not made progress since 1960. Today, as we await the NBS’s recalibration of our GDP, we can comfortably say without contradiction that it is at least 50 times, if not 100 times, more than it was at Independence,” he said.
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