Buhari Women, Poverty And Budget Padding

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

Two stories broke in the last one week that tend to amplify the fact that President Muhammadu Buhari’s goal of running Nigeria completely aground continues apace even as his administration, on the home stretch, and its vuvuzelas, continue to play the ostrich.

*Farouq and Buhari

First, the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, disclosed on November 17, that 133 million Nigerians are multi-dimensionally poor. That represents about 63 per cent of the estimated population of about 218 million people.

Ordinarily, this information shouldn’t surprise anyone considering that Nigeria had adorned the infamous ‘World Poverty Capital’ badge since 2018. World Bank data had shown since 2016 that four in every ten Nigerians live below the poverty line of $1.9 per day. Two years later, the country was declared world’s poverty capital by the Brookings Institution, knocking off India from the inglorious perch.

Nigeria's Poverty And Social Relations

By Dan Amor

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. 

President Buhari And His Lifeless Presidency

By Adebayo Raphael

Since the beginning of Nigeria's fourth republic in 1999, the present administration of the All Progressives Congress (APC) led by President Muhammadu Buhari is unarguably the worst. The failure of the incumbent administration to live up to expectations, within and outside Nigeria, relegates every measure of the towering hope that welcomed it. 

*President Buhari 

The current president of Nigeria has consistently proved to the world that he is undeserving of leading this magnificent country of 180 million extraordinary people imbued with unimaginable potential. The Nigeria that our current president projects in the world, is a backward, ignorant, antiquated, unalluring, visionless, confused, unimaginative rudderless country. At different times when president Buhari has had the opportunity to blisteringly fly the flags of Nigeria before the world, he unabashedly sullied it instead.