The presidency has rebuffed claims made by the outgoing president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwunmi Adesina, who asserted that Nigerians were better off economically in the 1960s than they are today, citing plunging per capita income.
Reacting to the claims, Bayo Onanuga, special adviser, Information and Strategy to the President in a post on X Monday, said the submissions of the AfDB chief doesn’t “align with available data”, stressing that “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.”
Adesina had reportedly said that Nigeria’s GDP per capita, a tool used in measuring the economic well being of citizens, stood at $1,847 in 1960 and that it had plummeted to $824 today, figures Onanuga said were not correct.
BusinessDay’s checks show that Nigeria’s GDP per capita stood at $93.17 at independence with the economy at $4.2 billion, according to data sourced from the World Bank.
Recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) showed that the per capita income had dropped from $877 last year to $835 in 2025, reflecting reduced living standards.
“Our country’s GDP did not rise remarkably until the 1970s, when crude earnings ballooned,” Onanuga said.
“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.”
The president’s spokesman said that GDP per capita alone can’t be used to determine whether people live better lives now than in the past, clarifying that its primary usefulness is to compare economic output in a country or between countries.
“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.”
He noted that Vodacom, a telecommunications company, lost big on Nigeria using the available GDP metrics to bet on the nation’s market as they believed that Nigerians were too poor to afford GSM services.
“However, MTN and other companies that entered the market later proved them wrong, demonstrating that GDP figures alone do not provide a complete picture of a country’s economic potential or the living standards of its people.”
Highlighting some of the strides of the country in the past 64 years, Onanuga said compared with 1960, Nigeria now has more primary, secondary, and tertiary schools, stating that the country now has more road networks and more medical facilities, private and public.
“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.
Citing the success of MTN that had stayed in the country for more than 20 years even in the face of headwinds, Onanuga said the multinational firm is “still laughing despite some setbacks in 2023 and 2024.”
“In its first-quarter results this year, MTN declared revenue of N1 trillion and an increase of 8.2 percent in subscriptions, which took the number of its voice and data users to 84 million.
“Does this MTN experience correlate with a country worse off than in 1960, when we had analogue telephones and the number of lines was fewer than 20,000?’” he asked rhetorically.
