By Dan Amor
Against the backdrop of the declaration of Tuesday
October 16, 2017, as 'World Poverty Day', we may well take a critical look at a
damning document entitled, "Report Card on World Social Progress".
Released currently in the United
States of America by the International
Society for Life Quality Studies, the report has identified the best countries
in which to live in the world. These include Denmark ,
Sweden , Norway , Finland ,
Luxembourg , Germany , Austria
and Belgium
, in that order. The report which is signed by the group's international
president, Prof. Richard Estes, who has studied human development for over 45
years, has equally stated the bottom 10 poorest nations in the world. They
include Afghanistan , Eritrea , Ethiopia ,
Sierra Leone , Angola , Liberia ,
Niger , Nigeria , Guinea ,
Chad
and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The report was compiled based on data
provided by governments to the United Nations and measures the ability of
nations to meet the basic needs of their residents in terms of health,
education, security, human rights, political participation, population growth,
improved women's status, cultural diversity and freedom from social chaos.
*Buhari and Obasanjo |
According the report, the overall picture for social
progress in the world is grim with 21 African and Asian countries nearing
social collapse due to concentrated poverty, weak political institutions,
repeated economic failure, disease and cultural dislocation. But the report
missed out corruption which is the bane of the Nigerian society and the major
cause of poverty in the country. Of course, Nigeria , since 1998, has been
described by the Berlin-based anti-corruption organisation ,Transparency
International, as one of the five most corrupt countries in the world.
Unfortunately, President Muhammadu Buhari, who claims to be fighting
corruption, did not even bother any hoot to address the nation on the pervasive
and scandalous maze of mass poverty in Nigeria . Yet, the irony of the
Nigerian condition is that Buhari was a cabinet member of the military regime
of General Olusegun Obasanjo (1976-1979) which actually handed over the legacy
of poverty to the Alhaji Shehu Shagari regime (1979-1983). The Obasanjo
military regime it was which syndicated the first ever $15billion loan from a
consortium of European banks. Millions of Nigerians were sacked from work and
their sources of livelihood were sacrificed to meet International Monetary Fund
(IMF) conditionalities for the granting of the loan.
It is a historical fact that Obasanjo, Buhari and
Babangida are the progenitors of the poverty culture in Nigeria as
Commanders-in-Chief of a rogue ruling class whose members are completely out to
amass wealth at the expense of the society instead of reinforcing the social
classes in a positive sense. Since the past eighteen years of a phantom
democratic system under their misguided leadership, Nigerians have experienced
the worst form of poverty in the history of the country. It has even become
unbearable in the current Buhari administration. To say therefore that
Nigerians are dying of hunger and gnashing of teeth under the watch of General
Buhari is to beg the issue. After Obasanjo's military regime, the profligate
civilian administration of Shehu Shagari came to establish Nigerians more
firmly in the classical poverty orbit. Shagari, a lame duck civilian president,
brought on board sons of Emirs and blue-blooded aristocrats whose veins human
blood does not flow and whose social distance from the proverbial common man is
generally contemptuous. They told Nigerians to eat from dustbins while they
carted the national treasury to foreign banks in Switzerland ,
London and the United States of America .
But the historical factor in the creation and promotion
of poverty culture in Nigeria
cannot be ignored. Reparations, debt relief or outright cancellation cannot
reduce poverty in Nigeria .
To see poverty totally or simply as the child of these factors is to ignore the
contemporary reality. In fact, the reality of today's Nigeria is that
there is a deliberate determination on the part of the mundane leadership to
create a poor class who are to be used as reference of real underdevelopment in
order to attract loans from international finance institutions into their
private pockets. It is also to establish an underclass populace that would
serve as some sort of benign index of permanent jest to which an indifferent
world would always react when laughing at Nigeria . Yes, people laugh at Nigeria and
then Nigerian leaders themselves try to stave off this laughter by pointing to
the underclass they have created as the real laughing stock. Nigeria is a
fool's paradise, a jester's haven where members of the looting class even
invoke divine and religious paradigms to help perpetuate the poverty syndrome.
A government which encourages force of arms by herdsmen against armless or
defenseless farmers and communities is deepening poverty in the society.
In Northern Nigeria ,
the Emirate system creates a large poor class who accept their poverty as the
divine will of God. To this class of materially disadvantaged people, the Emir
with his flock of cattle, several companies and fat bank accounts, is the
redeemer to whom they must flock to receive material relief from hunger. This
class of people is the permanent poor class, the celestial dregs who can only
be changed by reincarnation. So, in effect, even if the material needs were
sufficient to alleviate poverty, the system just won't succumb. It is
unthinkable that Nigerians are currently passing through hell under the
leadership of a supposedly progressive political party which rode to power on
the platter of a "CHANGE" agenda. How we came to this sorry pass is a
story for another day. Whereas the Nigerian people were managing to survive the
stress of a very difficult economic condition, Buhari came to add salt to injury
by unilaterally increasing the pump price of fuel from N86 to N145 per litre.
This was the death knell that aggravated poverty in the country since May 2015.
Buhari who was petroleum minister in the military regime of General Obasanjo
(1976-1979), still doubles as president and petroleum minister more than 40
years after, as though the country is incapable of regeneration.
It is agonizing that even in the 21st century, Nigeria
still has as leaders, a bunch of thieves and social pretenders who don't bother
any hoot whether the poor survive or not. The last administration set up what
it termed SURE-P, to reinvest proceeds from the partial removal of petroleum
subsidy. Nobody was sure of SURE-P until N500billion was declared missing. Now,
the money is missing in trillions. And yet we are blowing trumpet all over the
world that we are fighting corruption. High-powered attempts at smoothening the
social disequilibrium through institutionalized means have all but collapsed
like a pack of cards in the face of rapid erosion of social power. No longer is
higher education a guarantee of the good life as the take-home pay of the
average honest Nigerian worker can no longer take him home.
This sense of uncertainty in the midst of sectionalised
affluence expressed in leadership corruption makes poverty the birthright of
majority of the Nigerian people. Stories abound of government officials who, in
collaboration with seedy contractors, siphon billions of budgeted funds into
their private pockets. This aegis of layered corruption, unchecked and
uncensored, makes the poverty dilemma a complicated and difficult one indeed.
Currently poverty is expressed in manifest deaths and epidemics across the
country. Nigeria
is a peculiar kind of hell. Is it not a shame that in spite of our huge annual
earnings from the sale of crude oil, Value Added Tax (VAT) and other sources of
national income, our country is continually grouped among war-ravaged countries
as one of the poorest in the world? Someone should tell Buhari that there is abject
and chronic poverty in Nigeria ,
which is being promoted by his government. It is what is fueling insecurity,
agitations, tensions, kidnapping and killings across the country.
*Dan Amor, a public
affairs analyst, writes from Abuja
(danamor641@gmail.com)
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