By Gbenro Olajuyigbe
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice – Nelson Mandela
Poverty and inequality are bombs, detonated by bad governance; they shatter the worth of human dignity, diminish standard of living, enable economic and social injustices and unevadeably trigger social crisis that could reconstruct civilization that returns people to the dark age, with inch, not better than the Orwellian Animal Farm. In the words of Nelson Mandela at the London’s Trafalgar Square in 2005; “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”
Nigeria’s Poverty mills now runs on grueling threshers, elite- and self-serving policy invented mills, dangerously and cruelly crushing the poor into powdery primitive prey, with little or no capacity to resist fierce predators unleashed them nor capability to compel the attention of the monopolist power holders who have chosen blinding themselves to the cries of the repressed and depressed as an advanced strategy to enforce pre-mechanized plans to put the toiling poor and peasants, the degraded hungry population squarely under grave undertakings for perpetual servitude.
We watched helplessly, the country becoming a huge IDP’s camp, where renewal of hope is measured by the cups of rice distributed, number of noodles shared to the tiny percentage of the hungry and the number of Akara kiosks established. Mediocrity is the new normal; how Jonathan’s 500-billion-dollar Economy shrunk to 199-billion-dollar Economy in the hand of the hands of predatory reformers.
Nigeria has descended from the Olympian height of being the largest economy in Africa to being the fourth. From food to energy, petrol to electricity, fertilizer to cement, security to protection, the ugliness of the Nigerian poverty and misery is advertised with lack of access, affordability even where available.
Manufacturing, power generation and distribution are the least that bother a government that is fixated on taxation without accountability, borrowing without transparency, spending abstemiously on vacation and health resort abroad to the detriment of the people on which austerity measures have been imposed.
Strange behaviour and inconsiderate attitude of the political class have imposed on Nigeria unnecessary economic burden. Nigerians fought and some died for democracy because they saw in democracy opportunity to actualize the benefits that are embedded in just and democratic governance.
The flood of famine and poverty is already sweeping people off their feet; castrating them of honor and dignity; battered individuals and fractured families have become the striking pictorial evidence of the 17.9 million people dumped into the pit of poverty in the last three years.
According to the UN report, Nigeria has the inglorious global record of hosting the largest number of the poor in the world; out of the 51.5 million persons added to the number of people living in multidimentional poverty in the last three years,17.9 million are Nigerians, meaning that more than a third of the global number are Nigerians.
The most upsetting fact is that the government continues to pay deafening attention to the ferociously rampaging poverty, swimming in the illusion of much more Naira with no value attached. It is not backing down on its poverty-taxing- policy nor bother about its relentless reckless borrowing that continues to put blight on the state’s capacity for economic recovery. In the last three years, Nigeria has not successfully run any budget. At the threshold of this year, the budget utilization for the previous year grossly underperformed, with less than thirty percent utilization. Nigeria is concurrently running two different budgets; the 2025 and 2026 budgets. This is an anathema to planning and execution of plans, policies and projects.
It is sad that out of mischief or ignorance that some Nigerians, including government officials continue to share comparative analyses that have no regard for the concept of appropriate baseline in order to justify these absurdities. No government should be proud of such econometric illiteracy. Literacy is a core requirement in diligent analysis for accountable governance.
The problems of Nigeria are squarely linked to the removal of fuel subsidies and the significantly steep devaluation of Naira, which have led to astronomical cost of living; transport, house rent, fuel, and food among others. The one-way traffic reformers are so obsessed that they have demonised subsidy. The government of Saudi Arabia heavily subsidizes the price of fuel so as to reduce the cost of living for her people. Saudi government does this through Saudi Aramco, the retail fuel price per litre is $0.58 USD, equivalent of 758 Naira. Despite the non-payment of subsidy, debts continue to pile up.
According to the Debt Management Office, Nigeria’s total public debt between 2015 and 2023, under President Buhari, flew from ₦12.12 trillion (US$64 billion) to ₦97.34 trillion (US$108.23 billion) by the end of December 2023. Under President Tinubu, the debt profile has climbed dangerously to ₦166.79 trillion (approx. $120.9 billion) by June 2026, meaning that President Tinubu heaped 70 trillion Naira debt on Nigeria within his 3 years in office; more than what Buhari borrowed in 8 years. This excludes his most recent letter of intent to borrow additional $20.5 billion and €1.45 billion.
The economic policy choices that the president made has substantially led to the liberty of the primitive; the rise of the street gangs that continues to tamper with local and national tranquility, frightening expansion of tribal friction, polluting the bloodstream of national unity and peace. The intrusion of violent crimes and the disappearance of social cohesion have only led to a nation where it has become difficult, if not impossible to arrive at consensus on any national issues; including protection, security and sustainable development.
The level of social disorder, poverty induced individual neurosis, policy blurred environment have geometrically increased vulnerability, wretchedness and propensities for criminalities. How can a country in which three million young people enter the labor market continue to thoughtlessly elongate the length and years of service of those due for retirement? This is an antithesis to the logic of addressing youth unemployment. A country with this frightening figure of youth unemployment increasing retirement age from 60 years to 65 years or even 70 years in some instances is a country deficient in planning and illogical in policy articulation.
There is no durable value-addition to policy formulation.
Is it not absurd that a country with hundreds of thousands in housing shortfall will prioritize concrete built roads over macadamized asphalt roads, thereby making the costs of cement, the most critical material in housing construction, astronomically higher than what even a middle-class worker can afford? – a country with high deposits of untapped bitumen. A government that has no regard to the opportunity costs of its policies, particularly where it has comparative advantage and alternatives has no business in drafting policies for development.
We can flounder over other questions but not these economic questions that have precipitation of elements of economic Insanity: how does one justify the removal of oil subsidy, the floating of Naira when juxtaposed with the relentlessly reckless borrowing that continues to block escape routes out of poverty? Where are the monies from subsidy going? What of the monies from the compulsive borrowings and the illusionary monies purportedly safe from the obnoxious policy’s outputs?
The ghoulish benefits of irredeemably defective policies are mere illusion of failed hope and poorly constructed vision that have turned to miserable nightmares. As the acceleration of the policy gears continue; poverty grows in huge proportion, misery expands without measure and the infamy of being host to the world’s largest number of the poor people becomes a lacerated laurel for a country earnestly yearning for egg-headed compassionate leadership, holistic policy thinkers and committed patriots that are able and capable of raising the flags of accountability and scoring goals for transparency.
Recently, a daring assignment took me deeper into the frightening nadir of dereliction rulers in Africa have sunk in exercising absolute power to corrupt democracy and distribute poverty, dismantle accountability, weaken structures and systems, diminish social justice, bankrupt treasuries, endanger liberty, frustrate peace and indenture even unborn generations to cruel creditors with debt burdens that have arrested growth, trapped development and triggered ubiquitous violence. For a fact and with evidence, we are in dire straits; frighteningly bifurcated along ethnic and religious fault lines; with disillusioned peoples, insecurely roaming streets of poverty barefoot, without freedom from want and fear.
When compassion deserts a leader, wisdom will take a flight, cruelty will rush in to fill the hollow created as the roaring demon. The index medicus of a country abandoned in the hands of progressively incompetent comprador rulers is ignoble ruins and definite free-fleeting calamity!
It is one of the wildest forms of audacity for those who cluelessly destroyed the country’s currency to be waving flags of self-adulation. Calling such a carefully organized cruelty against the symbol of commerce and fiduciary dignity, a reform, is correspondingly an embarrassing national ‘infra dignitatem!
*Gbenro Olajuyigbe is the Executive Director of Emergency & Risk Alert Initiative
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