Recently, there emerged two very disturbing reports,
each dealing with chronic poverty in Africa vis-a-vis Nigeria , that are very unsettling.
One is from the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC-based Economic
think-tank. Its report titled: "The Start of A New Poverty
Narrative", was specifically based on the work of three experts who are
associated with the "World Poverty Clock", an Economic Study Group
launched in 2017, to track trends in poverty reduction across the world.
The
kennel of the report is that Nigeria
had overtaken India
as the country with the largest number of extreme poor in the world, to be
seconded only by the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC. What this
means is that Nigeria
is the poverty capital of the world. The other one is a damning document
entitled, "Report Card on World Social Progress". Released also 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.
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, Africa's foremost anti-corruption
czar, has not even bothered 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 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 nineteen 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 Alhaji 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 . Currently, over $60billion is
carted away abroad annually by African leaders and their surrogates while the
continent bleeds.
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 effort 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. If
herdsmen sack hundreds of communities and burn down their farms and render the
people idle in refugee camps as internally displaced people, would there still
be food for the teeming population?
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. The sitting
governor of Kano State who was recently allegedly
associated with the dollarisation of governance was said to have announced that
about 500,000 children are lamentably malnourished in his own state. Here is a
man who boasts every now and then that their administration is the best thing
that has happened to Nigeria
since the foundation of the country. There is a huge sense of frustration in
the midst of plenty in Nigeria .
This sense of uncertainty in the midst of
sectionalised affluence expressed in leadership corruption makes poverty the
birthright of a 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.
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