National Coordinator of Centre for Peace and Environmental Justice (CEPEJ), Mr. Sheriff Mulade, has said the recent report of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) ranking Delta as Nigeria’s second least poor state, does not reflect the economic realities of the state.
The human rights activist said most Deltans had been living below the poverty line, which showed that the NBS’s report was fake and misleading.
The NBS on Monday, May 4, 2020, released the long-awaited Nigeria Poverty and Inequality Survey Report 2019 and ranked Delta State as the second least poor state in Nigeria.
By its latest Poverty Index Report, the Bureau ranked Delta State second after Lagos, among the states with low poverty rate, stating that 40.1 per cent of Nigeria’s population was poor.
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According to the report, an average of four out of 10 Nigerians had real per capita expenditures below N137, 430 per year, meaning that the monthly per capital income in this category was less than N11,500, while income per day was N383.03.
The Report said Lagos state had 4.50 per cent poverty head count rate, closely trailed by Delta State with 6.02 per cent.
Analysing the NBS report, Mulade said majority of Deltans had been living below the poverty line, less than N450 per day, especially those in the riverine communities of the state.
He argued that Delta State could claim to be the second richest state in Nigeria when most Deltans had been jobless and had turned themselves into corporate beggars, hanging around ATMs, market places, shopping malls, streets and communities, looking for daily food.
While commending Governor Ifeanyi Okowa for his Prosperity for All Deltans Initiative that had helped to lower the poverty bar in the state, Mulade charged the governor to create more jobs and design capacity building and sustainable economic empowerment programmes for women and young entrepreneurs in the state.
