I’m a Nigerian by citizenship, which means that I’m qualified to talk about Nigeria, but I’ve also at least stayed in Qatar for a tiny bit of time in my life, which also means that I’m qualified to look at both countries and compare them side by side. Qatar is a tiny country. In fact, Qatar’s total area is 11,586 square kilometers, compared to Nigeria’s 923,768 square kilometers. So Nigeria is a huge country, while Qatar makes up about 1.25 percent of the size of Nigeria.
Also doing some statistics, Nigeria has, depending on who we are quoting, approximately 225 million people while Qatar, on the other hand, has barely 3 million people living in that piece of land. By simply looking at photographs of both countries, you can tell that Qatar is a lot more developed and a lot more richer than Nigeria, but perhaps we should not go by my words and look at a few things that separate both countries.
In terms of economic numbers or indices, Nigeria’s annual GDP for 2022 is 477,376 million dollars, as compared to Qatar’s annual GDP for 2022 of 237,296 million dollars. However, Nigeria is a country of population of well over 200 million people, with Qatar having just around 3 million people. The effect of this is that the GDP per capita of Qatar is at a staggering $90,000 minimum as compared to Nigeria’s $2,000 GDP.
Poverty in Nigeria
Nigeria is largely a poor country but if there’s something good about Nigeria, it has to be with the cost of living index. As compared to Qatar, Nigeria is ranked as number 153rd country in the list of the most expensive countries to live in as compared to Qatar where things are more expensive and Qatar is ranked at number 15th on that list. Nigeria is a totally poor country and in the year 2022, there was a large-scale survey between a few organizations in the United Nations as well as the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics and the survey was conducted on 56,000 households across all the 36 states of Nigeria and the results are horrible.
It was concluded that 63% of Nigeria’s which amounts to 133 million people are multidimensionally poor and the majority of the people are in northern Nigeria. 65% of the people are in northern Nigeria and 35% of these poor people are in southern Nigeria and this poverty varies across different states in the federations.
According to the reports that the Nigerian government sanctioned itself, it was discovered that 133 million people are poor. These poor people cook with dung or they use wood or charcoal and they don’t have access to clean energy and the sanitation in these places and health care and food and housings are terrible in these locations and in general multidimensional poverty is really a big deal in Nigeria even a lot of Nigerians are also poor in terms of money.
Monetary poverty is also high in Nigeria. This is definitely not the case in Qatar. Qatar is a well-run society. The citizens are well taken care of. If people are poor in Qatar, it’s most likely the immigrants who come to do the low-paying jobs in Qatar. The citizens themselves are poor because they make very good use of their oil money and the money circulates as compared to Nigeria where only the elites and the politicians keep all the money that belongs to everybody. You can tell me in the comments. Definitely, Nigeria is a much much poorer country than Qatar. Thank you.
Author
Abbey Johnson has a Masters degree as an engineer and has over 3 years of teaching and research experience. He is happiest when on a bike and is also interested in electric energy and computer Science.