ActionAid Nigeria (AAN) has sharply criticised recent remarks by the Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, accusing the presidency of normalising hunger and economic hardship and dismissing the daily struggles of millions of Nigerians
The organisation said the presidential spokesman’s claim that he could not see the level of hunger Nigerians complain about, based on his personal observations and interactions with people around him, reflected a dangerous disconnect from realities across the country.
In a statement issued in Abuja on Wednesday, ActionAid Nigeria described such remarks as careless and unsupported by evidence, insisting that the hardship confronting Nigerians was documented in official statistics and reflected in the experiences of communities across the country.
The organisation noted that although Onanuga questioned the extent of hunger in Nigeria, he acknowledged during the same interview that the prices of food items had risen significantly. According to ActionAid, a crate of eggs that sold for about N600 a few years ago now costs between N6,000 and N8,500, underscoring the severity of the cost-of-living crisis.
It said official figures from the National Bureau of Statistics showed that food inflation rose to 16.96 per cent year-on-year in May 2026, from 16.68 per cent in April, driven by increasing prices of staples such as onions, maize, yam, cassava, tomatoes, pepper, wheat and plantain.
ActionAid further noted that the naira’s devaluation had eroded the purchasing power of workers and households, while labour groups had repeatedly argued that incomes would need to rise substantially to restore the living standards Nigerians enjoyed about a decade ago.
The organisation maintained that communities it works with across Nigeria, including women smallholder farmers, informal traders and residents of conflict-affected and displaced communities, continue to report worsening conditions, with food, transportation, healthcare and other basic necessities increasingly becoming unaffordable.
It stressed that the realities of hunger and hardship were not products of political propaganda or social media exaggeration but were evident in market prices, government inflation data, school enrolment figures and the difficult choices families now make to survive.
ActionAid also challenged the presidency’s claims on improving security conditions, citing independent reports that indicated otherwise.
According to the organisation, the Nigeria Watch violence-monitoring project documented 12,954 violent deaths across the country in 2025, while fatalities linked to kidnappings rose from 425 in 2024 to 747 in 2025. It added that incidents of rural banditry spread from nine states to sixteen states during the same period.
The organisation also cited data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, which ranked Nigeria as the deadliest country in West Africa during the first half of 2025, accounting for 5,768 conflict-related deaths, representing 44.5 per cent of all fatalities recorded in the region.
Country Director of ActionAid Nigeria, Andrew Mamedu, said public officials who have the privilege of working closely with the presidency have a responsibility to understand and communicate the realities confronting citizens.
He lamented that millions of Nigerians were no longer making choices aimed at improving their lives but were instead deciding which basic necessities they could afford to forgo.
According to him, families are increasingly skipping meals to pay transport fares, avoiding hospitals because they cannot afford treatment and compromising their children’s education because survival has become their overriding concern.
Mamedu recounted the experience of a family in the Lekki area whose son often trekked long distances to school because there was no junior secondary school in their community and his parents could not consistently afford transportation costs.
He said the boy, shortly after recovering from an illness, embarked on the long trek to school, collapsed and died.
“This was not a medical mystery. It was Nigeria failing a child in every way that mattered until it cost him his life,” he said.
ActionAid consequently demanded that government officials stop downplaying the cost-of-living crisis and begin addressing it as an urgent national emergency affecting millions of citizens.
The organisation urged governments at all levels to tackle the root causes of rising living costs through investments in local food production, improved transport and logistics infrastructure and stronger social protection and social security programmes tailored to the realities of low-income households.
It also called for economic relief measures to be designed and regularly reviewed in consultation with communities most affected by inflation, currency devaluation and rising costs of transportation, healthcare and education.
ActionAid reaffirmed its commitment to working with government, communities and other stakeholders to identify solutions that improve citizens’ welfare, while continuing to document and amplify the experiences of vulnerable populations and hold public officials accountable to standards of honesty, empathy and evidence-based governance.
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