Reno Omokri says N3,000 daily enough for average Nigerian to survive

Reno Omokri, former presidential aide and ambassador‑designate to Mexico, told Channels Television’s Politics Today on Sunday that an average Nigerian can get by on about ₦3,000 a day. He said he recently travelled across Nigeria with a journalist, without security, stopping at markets to price staple foods such as yam, rice, maize and fruits, and found that amount sufficient for daily needs.

Omokri contrasted the Nigerian situation with the United States, where living on the equivalent of ₦3,000 per day would be regarded as poverty. He argued that international poverty benchmarks, like the World Bank’s global threshold, fail to account for Nigeria’s lower cost of living, stressing that context matters when measuring hardship.

He urged policymakers and citizens to consider local realities when designing welfare programmes and evaluating poverty metrics, asking whether Nigeria should adopt its own poverty line based on local food prices or continue to rely on international standards.

SOURCE: https://dailypost.ng/2026/09/14/n3000-daily-is-enough-for-average-nigerian-reno-omokri/