More Nigerians will be trapped in poverty because of increasing population Nigeria’s uncontrolled population is becoming worrying as the prospects of poverty reduction in the near future is increasingly becoming a mirage. This was underscored last week at the virtual launch of the 2021 Macroeconomic Outlook of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG). The World Bank said at the forum that about 15 million to 20 million more Nigerians would be tipped into poverty by 2022. At present, about 100 million people, half the population of Africa’s biggest economy, are already living below the poverty line. World Bank Senior Economist, Gloria Joseph-Raji, said that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Nigerian economy was hard. Indeed, the country experienced its second and deepest recession in five years since the 1980s in 2020, evidently a fallout of the catastrophic drop in the prices of oil, the country’s main foreign exchange earner. “We consider Nigeria right now to be at a critical junction,” she said, “in the sense that the achievement of its development goal of lifting 100 million people out of poverty by 2030 was already challenging even before COVID-19 struck, and then COVID-19 has made this even more challenging and more urgent.”