LABOUR Party presidential candidate in the 2023 general election, Peter Obi, has claimed that President Bola Tinubu’s government is providing Nigerians with incorrect statistics to conceal economic woes under his watch.
The former Anambra State Governor stated this in a post on his X handle on Monday, July 28.
“President Tinubu is now overfeeding Nigerians with wrong statistics from wrong unemployment figures, wrong inflation figures, and now GDP [gross domestic product] rebasing, all to put a positive spin on our deteriorating economic and household conditions,” Obi said.
He cited unemployment rate, inflation figure, and rebased GDP figures as wrong statistics under Tinubu.
He, however, noted that in November 2022, while campaigning in Delta State, Tinubu, who was the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate in the 2023 election, had promised to put food on the table of Nigerians and had shown disdain for statistics about the nation’s economy at the time.
“Na statistics we go chop? (Are we going to eat statistics?) All I want is to put food on the table of Nigerians,” he quoted Tinubu to said during the electioneering.
According to Obi, it is now two years into Tinubu’s four-year tenure, and Nigeria is classified as one of the hungriest nations in the world, with millions of Nigerians not knowing where their next meal will come from.
“Governance is not rocket science; it’s not a gamble, like I have always reiterated, it requires sincerity of purpose, character, competence, capacity, and compassion,” he added.
The ICIR reports that since he assumed office on May 29, 2023, Tinubu’s administration has made significant changes to the methodology used in the calculation of the unemployment rate, inflation, and GDP figures, as Obi cited.
In August 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) changed the methodology for calculating the country’s unemployment rate and slashed the figure to 4.1 per cent in the first quarter (Q1) of 2023 from 33.3 per cent in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2020.
The sharp drop in unemployment rate, many analysts had argued, was not reflecting the accurate picture of the level of unemployment in the country.
Following the rebasing of the consumer price index (CPI) by the NBS, Nigeria’s headline inflation rate dropped to a new low of 24.48 per cent year-on-year in January this year, from 34.80 in December 2024.
Similarly, on July 21, the NBS released the long-awaited rebased GDP figure, stating that in real terms it grew by 3.13 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter from 2.27 in the same period of 2024.
In nominal terms, GDP growth increased to N372.82 trillion or $242.64 billion as of December 31, 2024, from $187.75 billion. It, however, left the country to retain its fourth-largest economy in Africa in 2024, despite rebasing the economy.