BY DAMOLA EMMANUEL

The Federal Executive Council, FEC, rose from its weekly meeting, Wednesday, and debunked a recent report by Brookings institution  that Nigeria had upstaged India as the country with the greatest number of people living in extreme poverty.

The reported said that Nigeria earned the inglorious title with 87 million of its citizen living in abject poverty, while six join the club of the extreme poor every minute.

Hitherto, India, according the report, had maintained the first position with 73million of its citizens, living in extreme poverty.

But briefing State House Correspondents, Wednesday, in Abuja, Okechukwu Enelamah, Minister of Trade and Investments, thrashed the report that installed Nigeria as the world capital of poverty, describing it as a warped impression of the prevailing economic realities in the nation.

Enelamah faulted the indices used in arriving at the unsavoury conclusion, saying that the reporting institution may have obtained the data it used for the assessment while Nigeria’s economy was in recession. He advised Nigerians not to give the report any thought.

“Somebody may have written a report when we were in recession,” Enelamah said. “Remember that if you are in a recession, what it means is that though your population is growing, people don’t stop procreating, …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. “