Embarrassed by a recent Brookings Report that rated Nigerians as the most impoverished country globally, the Federal Government on Wednesday described the report as not factual, claiming that the report findings as not reflecting the true state of poverty level in the country.

The Minister of Industry Trade and Investment, Okechukwu Enelamah, who stoutly refuted the indices as contrary to the economic realities in the country, said that the indices used in arriving at the report might have been compiled when the country was in economic recession.

Enelamah said this while answering questions from State House correspondents after the  Federal Executive Council meeting in Presidential Villa, Abuja.

While urging the people to discountenance the report, the minister restated the present administration’s determination to improve the socio-economic wellbeing of the citizenry by putting in place necessary poverty-alleviating machinery and measures in place.

He said: “Somebody may have written a report when we were in recession. Remember that if you are in a recession, what it means is that though your population is growing, people don’t stop procreating, your growth fact, which means that in theory depending on how they run those numbers, you will be going the other way.

“There is absolutely no question that there is an urgency to create employment in Nigeria. And it has to be a collective responsibility.

“What I can tell you, with certainty based on one’s background in business and economics, is that if we complete the things on infrastructure and you implement these reports we are doing, that is what I mean by a leading indicator, poverty will go down.

“There is no magic to it. But you have to do it first, you have put in the infrastructure, you have to implement the economic programme which is what will create the opportunities, they don’t drop from the sky”, Enelamah claimed

It would be recalled that the report by Brookings Institution, a non-profit public policy organization in USA, had put Nigeria atop the world poverty chart.

The report, titled ‘The Start of a New Poverty Narrative’ indicated that Nigeria had  become the nation with the highest number of extremely poor people in the world, followed by the Republic of Congo.

The report stated inter alia: “According to our projections, Nigeria has already overtaken India as the country with the largest number of extreme poor in early 2018, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo could soon take over the number 2 spot.

“At the end of May 2018, our trajectories suggest that Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million. What is more, extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute, while poverty in India continues to fall”, it added.