The Peoples Democratic Party has said that President Muhammadu Buhari regime practices voodoo economics that has entrenched and increased poverty and hardship in Nigeria. 

Contrary to claims by Mr Buhari in his Democracy Day speech that 10.5 million Nigerians were lifted out of poverty in the last two years, the World Bank Tuesday reported that seven million Nigerians plunged below poverty line in 2020 as a result of increasing inflation. 

“As of April 2021, the inflation rate was the highest in four years. Food prices accounted for over 60 per cent of the total increase in inflation.

Rising prices have pushed an estimated seven million Nigerians below the poverty line in 2020 alone,” World Bank reported. 

Reacting to World Bank’s report, the opposition party in a statement by its spokesman Kola Ologbondiyan on Wednesday said Mr Buhari’s voodoo economics has wrecked Nigeria’s productive sectors.

“Under President Buhari, Nigerians are now subjected to the worst form of poverty and hardship, with collapsed purchasing power, occasioned by a voodoo economy management that have wrecked our productive sectors and pummeled our naira from the about N167 to a US dollar in 2015 to the current over N500 per dollar,” Mr Ologbondiyan said. 

Accusing the Buhari-led regime of destroying Nigerians’ economy in the last six years, the PDP said Mr Buhari keeps lying while Nigerians suffer more hardship and poverty. 

“It is unfortunate that Mr President will choose to always bandy fictitious figures and false performance claims, when he has, in a space of six years, destroyed our national productivity and reduced our country to a beggarly nation, a laughing stock and object of pity among the comity of nations,” Mr Ologbondiyan said. 

Recent report by the World Bank partly confirms the Bank’s earlier prediction that about  about 20 million Nigerians will plunged  below poverty line by 2022.