Nigeria’s Ambassador-designate to Mexico, Reno Omokri, has said the average Nigerian can survive on ₦3,000 daily, arguing that international poverty benchmarks fail to account for the economic realities of individual countries.
Omokri made the remarks while appearing on the television programme Sunday Politics, during a discussion on the cost of living in Nigeria and how it compares to global poverty standards. He said he had personally visited markets, accompanied only by a journalist and without security, to check the prices of everyday food items including yam, rice, maize and fruits.
Based on that assessment, Omokri said he concluded that Nigerians could reasonably live on ₦3,000 a day though he acknowledged the same amount would constitute poverty in the United States.
“I went there with one journalist, no security, and I stopped along the way, and I priced goods. I priced yam, I priced rice, I priced maize, I priced fruits. In Nigeria, people can live on that amount in a day,” he said. “But in the United States, if you try to live on that amount in a day, it is poverty. So, you have to [take] context again, context matters.”
Omokri went on to distinguish between the World Bank’s global poverty benchmark and what he described as the practical realities of the cost of living in Nigeria. He said the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s poverty threshold commonly cited as living on less than $2 a day should not be applied uniformly across countries without accounting for local price levels and purchasing power.
Pressed on whether he was disputing the World Bank’s benchmark outright, Omokri said the institution was simply applying a global standard, adding: “The World Bank is using a global benchmark. And they’ve always used it.”
Omokri, a former Special Assistant on New Media to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, was nominated as an ambassador by President Bola Tinubu on November 25, 2025, with his appointment subsequently confirmed by the Senate on December 19, 2025. He has since become one of the more vocal defenders of the Tinubu administration’s economic policies in public discourse.
His remarks come at a time when Nigeria’s cost-of-living crisis remains a dominant national concern, with food inflation having climbed for six consecutive months to 20.31 per cent as of July 2026, according to the National Bureau of Statistics even as broader headline inflation has eased. Critics have frequently pointed to worsening food prices, stagnant wages and a weakened naira as evidence that everyday costs remain far beyond what many Nigerian households can comfortably absorb, a tension likely to keep comments such as Omokri’s under public scrutiny.
As of the time of this report, neither the World Bank nor Nigerian economic policy bodies had issued a formal response to Omokri’s characterisation of the global poverty benchmark.
