By Dan Agbese
Some political promises are difficult to keep. The nature of politics induces political leaders to make promises they know they can only keep with soundbites and indifferent public applause.
You are not about to hear it from me that President Muhammadu Buhari has clearly failed in one of his core promises dear to the people: wrestling down poverty. He promised to take 100 million people out of poverty in ten years. To show that he meant business, sometime last year he appointed some experts to help him work out a formula for keeping his promise to the people. He does not have ten years, of course, but he has enough time to devise a mechanism or a formula that could be working in his name long after he leaves Aso Rock.
He claimed later that he took 15.5 million people out of poverty in six years;
10.5 million of whom left poverty behind in the last two years. The president
must have called in the experts to validate his formula for crushing poverty
and saving the people. Winning the anti-poverty war is critical to human
progress. Eric Meade rightly calls poverty “humanity’s greatest
challenge.”
On June 12 last year, Buhari painted an alluring picture of a
country emerging from poverty. In his broadcast to the nation, the president
said that the various intervention programmes of his administration had made
Nigeria a new, self-sufficient nation – a nation now able to produce enough
food to feed itself. The immediate effect on agriculture, he said, was that the
country now imports less food and produces more food. As he puts it, the ABP
has “resulted in a sharp decline in the nation’s major food import bill.”
Before his initiatives came into effect rice importation alone consumed $1
billion; currently, we spend only $18.5 million on rice importation annually.
Whatever might be the successes of the aforementioned initiatives,
they are not entirely responsible for the low food import bill. The credit goes
more or less to the shuttered borders. More importantly, at least two things
have defied the success of these initiatives. One, local food production is low
because insecurity has kept farmers at home, not on the farms. It works out at
less food at a higher cost to the consumers.
Two, the crash in the food import bill is welcome but we must not
forget that hunger results from lack of food. If we do not have enough food or
if the available food is priced beyond the reach of the majority of the people,
the low food import bill itself would avail us nothing. Given the situation in
which we now find ourselves, some adjustments need to be made quickly to ensure
a reasonable balance between the need to save money and the need to feed the
people and prevent the country from sliding down the dangerous slopes into
famine. The World Bank has even warned of famine in sub-Saharan Africa. We must
resolve not to add famine to the portfolio of our horrendous national
challenges.
The president’s grand claims actually amount to plausible fiction.
From all indications, the poverty in our country is clearly deepening and thus
worsening in the face of our insecurity challenges and a national economy
somewhat sustained with unsustainable loans. The wanton destruction of lives
and property, the uprooting of perhaps millions of people from their homes and
the loss of their means of livelihood and who now live in the internally
displaced persons’ camps deprived of economic activities, the desertion of
farms by our peasant farmers for fear of killers and kidnappers with the
obvious result that we produce less food locally, the disruption of commercial
and social interactions because killers, bandits and kidnappers are the lords
of our roads – all these point to the fact that the president sees the
realities with blinkers on.
A few days after the president made his claims, the World Bank
spoilt the good news. In a report released on June 16 the bank said that a high
inflation rate led to the high cost of goods and services and made seven
million additional Nigerians poor.
“As of April 2021,” the bank noted, “the inflation rate was the highest in four
years. Food prices accounted for over 60% of the total increase in inflation.
Rising prices have pushed an estimated 7 million Nigerians below the poverty
line in 2020 alone.”
We have an estimated national population of either 207 or 230
million. Of this number some 100 million people live below the poverty line.
Tells you why our country is the poverty capital of the world. It won that
crown under Buhari’s watch, hence his promise to change the poverty narrative
and give the crown to a country more deserving of the honour we have enjoyed
since 2017. The poor, like the rich, have grades. Experts classify them into
the poor, the vulnerable and the extremely poor. We have all the grades of the
poor in our country.
Last year Buhari assured that: “My vision of pulling 100 million
poor Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years has been put into action and can be
seen in the National Social Investment Programme, a first in Africa and one of
the largest in the world where over 31.6 million beneficiaries are taking part.
We now have a National Social Register of poor and vulnerable households,
identified across 708 local government areas, 8,723 wards and 86,610
communities in the 36 states and Abuja.”
Fighting poverty is a circular challenge. It is a human problem. When
a government pulls some people above the poverty line, circumstances push new
people below the poverty line. It is a win-lose-win-lose situation. Whereas
Buhari pulled 15.5 million people out of poverty in the last two years, seven
million new people sank below the poverty line in 2020 alone.
The president finds it frustrating. He confessed that his efforts
to bring solutions we can believe in are being undermined by “scarce resources
and galloping population growth rate that consistently outstrips our capacity
to provide jobs for our populace.”
Our stellar performance in the maternity wards is ruining our
economy. Our “galloping population growth rate” imposes on the Nigerian state
more mouths to feed, more young people to educate and more young people to
provide for in terms of job opportunities. Our galloping population makes the
president look like someone who has problems with keeping promises to the
people.
About a month ago, the National Bureau of Statistics told the
president that the nation under his watch has sunk deeper into greater poverty
than at any time in our national history. Despite his glorified initiatives,
133 million Nigerians are now officially classified as poor by the NBS.
That must be shocking news to the president. The man who believed he took on poverty and won, now confronts the bitter truth that he took on poverty and lost the battle rather woefully. His much-touted initiatives must have collectively induced greater poverty than tackled it.
Buhari is set to leave office without keeping this promise to the people. He has
taken no one out of poverty, let alone 15.5 million people. When he made the
promise, he believed he had the capacity to achieve the tremendous feat to
which no Nigerian leader, military or civilian, has so far come even
close.
Well, not to worry, Napoleon famously said that promises are made
to be broken. We cannot hold Buhari’s string of broken promises against him.
Politics makes promises the staple of diet of the game. The politician who will
not make unrealistic promises he knows he cannot fulfil, is not yet born.
*Agbese, a
veteran journalist, comments on public issues
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