The National Bureau of Statistics in its latest National Multidimensional Poverty Index report which showed that 133 million Nigerians, approximately 63 per cent of entire population are multidimensionally poor, has further validated the opinions of several other non-state actors who hold the view and very strongly too that the existential realities in the country is suggestive of a fundamental socioeconomic crisis, reports Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf
At the turn of the new millennium, precisely in mid-2000, one of the key deliverables of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which governments across the globe including the Nigerian government consented to was to end extreme poverty and hunger.
However, two decades down the line, hunger and poverty remains a metaphor of existence with more than half of the Nigerian populace pinning under the yoke of poverty.
The high incidence of poverty in Nigeria amidst plenty is a pathetic case and call for concern. About two-third of the Nigerian people are poor, despite living in a country with vast potential wealth.
Although revenues from crude oil sales have been on the increase over the past decades, the citizens of the country have been falling deeper into poverty. What an irony. In 1980, an estimated 27 percent of Nigerians lived in poverty. By 1999, about 70 percent of Nigerians had income less than $1 a day and the figure has risen since then.
It may be recalled that the 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.
The Brookings’ report said: “At the end of May 2018, our trajectories suggest that Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million. What is more, extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute, while poverty in India continues to fall.”
The numbers climbed up to 93.9 million people in 2021 with Mr. Bismarck Rewane, Managing Director, Financial Derivatives Company, FDC, Limited, and a member of Buhari’s Economic Advisory Council, EAC, quoting a World Bank data, which stated that seven million Nigerians fell into extreme poverty in 2020.
Enter NBS damning report
The National Bureau of Statistics has disclosed that 133 million Nigerians are multi-dimensionally poor of the estimated population of about 218 million people.
In its latest National Multidimensional Poverty Index report launched a fortnight ago, the NBS said that 63 per cent of Nigerians were poor due to a lack of access to health, education, living standards, employment and security.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index offers a multivariate form of poverty assessment, identifying deprivations across health, education, living standards, work and shocks.
The Statistician-General of the Federation and CEO of the NBS, Semiu Adeniran, said this was the first time the bureau would conduct a standard multidimensional poverty survey in Nigeria.
“The survey was implemented in 2021 to 2022 and it is the largest survey with a sample size of over 56,610 people in 109 senatorial districts in the 36 states of Nigeria,” he said.
He added, “Unlike the Global MPI which uses three dimensions (Health, Education and Living Standards), we added a fourth dimension, Work and Shocks in the 2022 MPI Survey. This fourth dimension as well as other added variables such as food security, water reliability, underemployment, security shocks and school lag, were all added to reflect the current realities and priorities in Nigeria.”
The NBS report further showed Sokoto, Bayelsa, Gombe, Jigawa and Plateau are the top poorest states in 2022.
Sokoto leads the poorest with 90.5 per cent of people in the state being poor. It is followed by Bayelsa with 88.5 per cent poor people, Gombe with 86.2 per cent, Jigawa with 84.3 per cent, and Plateau with 84 per cent.
The least poor states are Ondo with 27.2 per cent poor people, Lagos with 29.4 per cent, Abia 29.8 per cent, Edo with 31 per cent, and Anambra with 32.1 per cent.
The report said that 65 per cent of poor Nigerians (86 million) were in the North, while 35 per cent (nearly 47 million) were in the South.
The report noted, “Overall, 65 percent of poor people – 86 million people – live in the North, while 35 per cent – nearly 47 million – live in the South. In general, a disparity between North and South is evident in both incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty, with the North being poorer.
“However, the level and number of poor people needs to be addressed in all zones – each of which are home to between 11 and 20 million poor people except North West, which has 45 million poor people due to its larger population and higher level of poverty.”
It also noted that 72 per cent of people in rural areas were poor. It is the same for 42 per cent of people in urban areas.
The report read, “Multidimensional poverty is higher in rural areas, where 72 per cent of people are poor, compared to 42 per cent of people in urban areas. Approximately 70 percent of Nigeria’s populations live in rural areas…”
According to the NBS Statistician-General, Semiu Adeniran, a sample size of over 56,610 people in 109 senatorial districts in the 36 states of Nigeria, was used in the survey – the first time the agency will conduct a standard multidimensional poverty survey in Nigeria.
The United Nations Resident Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, Matthias Schmale, who revealed the findings from the report, said 63 per cent of Nigerians are multi-dimensionally poor.
How MPI came about
The duo of Sabina Alkire and Maria Emma Santos designed the MPI using a technique for multidimensional measurement created by Sabina Alkire and James Foster. In 2010, OPHI analysed poverty across 78% of the world’s people in 104 developing countries using the MPI and released the results in advance of the 2010 HDR.
The developing area with the largest presence of multidimensional poverty is Sub- Saharan Africa, nearly 579 million, closely followed by South Asia with 385 million of the continent affected.
The Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index (2022) was launched in November 2022. It is built from 15 indicators grouped within four dimensions: health, education, living standards, and work and shocks.
Poor children
The NBS statistician-general also noted that the report covered poverty among children under five years of age in Nigeria.
He said, “The survey also has a linked Child MPI. This Child MPI extends the Nigeria MPI to include appropriate indicators for children under five, by adding a fifth dimension of child survival and development.
“This additional dimension contains eight vital aspects of early childhood development in physical and cognitive domains, including severe undernutrition, immunisation, intellectually stimulating activities, and preschool.
“While it does not offer individual-level data, it uncovers additional children who, according to the extra dimension, should qualify as multidimensionally poor.”
The report noted that 83.5 per cent of children under five years were poor in Nigeria due to lack of intellectual stimulation needed for childhood development.
It noted that the total number of poor under-five children in Nigeria was 22.85 million.
The report read, “Children are a strategic population of concern in Nigeria for several reasons. First, nearly half of all Nigerians are children under the age of 18 (47.2 per cent).
“According to the Child MPI, 83.5 per cent of children under five are poor. Incidence of Child MPI is above 50 per cent in all states and rises to almost 100 per cent in some states.
“The highest deprivations are in the indicator of child engagement – showing that over half of the poor children lack the intellectual stimulation that is pivotal to early childhood development. Child poverty is prevalent in rural areas with almost 90 per cent of rural children experiencing poverty.”
The report also stressed the need to address the issue of child marriage, which contributes to poverty for girls.
NBS, World Bank not in agreement
It is instructive to note that the 133 million poor Nigerians recorded by the NBS far exceeded the World Bank’s projection for Nigeria in 2022.
The World Bank, which said that poverty reduction stagnated since 2015 under the regime of the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), projected that the number of poor Nigerians would hit 95.1 million in 2022.
This projection was made in its report titled, ‘A Better Future for All Nigerians: 2022 Nigeria Poverty Assessment.’
The report had read, “The COVID-19 crisis is driving up Nigeria’s poverty rate, pushing more than five million additional people into poverty by 2022. With real per capita GDP growth being negative in all sectors in 2020, poverty is projected to have deepened for the current poor, while those households that were just above the poverty line prior to the COVID-19 crisis would be likely to fall into poverty.
“Were the crisis not to have hit (the counterfactual scenario), the poverty headcount rate would be forecast to remain virtually unchanged, with the number of poor people set to rise from 82.9 million in 2018/19 to 85.2 million in 2020 and 90.0 million in 2022, due largely to natural population growth.
“Given the effects of the crisis, however, the poverty headcount rate is instead projected to jump from 40.1 per cent in 2018/19 to 42.0 per cent in 2020 and 42.6 per cent in 2022, implying that the number of poor people was 89.0 million in 2020 and would be 95.1 million in 2022. Taking the difference between these two scenarios, the crisis alone is projected to have driven an additional 3.8 million Nigerians into poverty in 2020, with an additional 5.1 million living in poverty by 2022.”
Remote cause of poverty
Poverty has many causes and all of which reinforce one another, hence forming the vicious circle of poverty. One of such myriad causes of poverty is the lack of basic infrastructural services, such as education, clean water, and healthcare. Next is lack of income, including food, shelters, clothing and empowerment. The third is lack of assets, such as land, tools, credit and supportive networks friends and family.
Poor economic management, perhaps the greatest impediment to progress in Nigeria is the boom and bust mode of economic management, encouraged by the monolithic nature of the Nigerian economy. The unfriendly nature of the environment discourages private sector growth and this is made possible by the weak and inept nature of the public sector. Entrepreneurs wishing to operate in Nigeria face many constraints and these constraints include the following; inadequate and poor infrastructure such as road networks and electricity supply, poor security networks, corruption and poor judiciary services. These factors serve to discourage investment in the country.
In the view of Paul Collier of Oxford University, the vast resources available to Nigeria have been used unproductively, to support an elite class who does nothing but gained so much from economic rent open to the class through access to those in authority while the majority of the population have floundered into a condition worse than that found elsewhere in Africa.
Efforts to end poverty by successive government
Investigation by our correspondent revealed that the federal government and its state counterparts have made frantic efforts to end poverty in the country. Some of the programmes and strategies adopted by the government to put an end to poverty include but not limited to the following initiatives namely: National Accelerated Food Production Programmes, establishment of Industrial Development Centres, Integrated Rural Development (IRD), Operation Feed the Nation; The Green Revolution, Community Development; Self-reliance Programme; Directorate of Employment (NDA), Oil and Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission; Better Life for Rural Women, (BLRW), National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPP) and the New Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS).
Sadly, many of these programmes and strategies are moribund as a result of corruption and poor conception of the idea.
Why efforts to end poverty failed
On why efforts to end poverty has failed in Nigeria, the duo of Jebbin Maclean Felix and Angelinah Kurubo Osu, both of the Department of Economics, Ignatus Ajuru University of Education, Port Harcourt, argued that poverty eradication is not all about handouts and meeting needs but creating enabling environment that allow the individuals to exercise their inherent traits to better their lots.
In their treatise titled ‘Why efforts to end poverty failed’, regrettably, they said, the enabling environment is not possible to be created because the oppressors of the oppressed will not want anyone or anything to change the status quo, hence efforts to end poverty will continue to fail because the real issue is not addressed.
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Specifically, they said most anti-poverty programmes are planned by people wearing suits in air conditioned offices. Many a time, the planners of poverty alleviation programmes are foreigners who may not speak or understand the local language of the people. Even when anti-poverty programmes are designed by indigenes of the country where they are to be implemented, they may not have an in-depth knowledge about the poor.
Besides, anti-poverty programmes are mostly top-down hierarchy in nature. Top-down development programmes by government, non-governmental organisations or international agencies are always counterproductive because of corruption, bureaucratic bottlenecks and the gap between the planners and the purported beneficiaries.
In the view of Dr. Henrietta Omo Eshalomi of the University of Ibadan, the rather precarious situation caused by poverty is not only alarming but calls for concern.
In a chat with The Nation, she said lamentably, efforts to eradicate poverty have only rarely been directed at poor people or the challenges they face rather than working directly with the poor people, most of the efforts to end poverty adopted indirect methods by seeking to change the economic environment rather than the poor.
Buhari’s missed target
The rising poverty also defies the government’s plan to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years.
In June last year, the National Poverty Reduction with Growth Strategy was developed by the Presidential Economic Advisory Council to actualise President Buhari’s aspiration of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty by 2030.
The total cost of implementing the proposed initiatives was estimated at $1.6 trillion over 10 years between 2021 and 2031. Similarly, the report proposed the creation of a Nigerian investment and growth fund to mobilise funds for the implementation.
During the period, the annual average reduction in poverty is projected to be around 11.2 million per annum, 80% of which will be self-employment, and 20% in wage-paying jobs. Unfortunately, most of these provisions have not been implemented due to weak finance base and uncoordinated policy mix.
The President was quoted in a statement by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, as saying, “If India can lift 271 million people out of poverty between 2006 and 2016, Nigeria can surely lift 100 million out of poverty in 10 years. Fortunately, we have already started but we need to unlock the challenges of slow implementation, inappropriate targeting and absence of adequate resources.”
In October last year, the World Bank Lead Economist for the Middle East and North Africa region’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Group, Tara Vishwanath, had described the goal of the Nigerian President to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years as ambitious.
She said the ambitious goal could only be feasible if certain swift policies were put in place to provide opportunities in the labour market and boost investors’ confidence.
World Bank economists, Jonathan Lain and Jakob Engel, said in a blogpost on the bank’s website that rising inflation, persistent population growth, the COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine were threatening Nigeria’s poverty reduction aspiration.
FG, states blame game
In the wake of the NBS report, the federal government and state governors have been trading blames, with the former accusing the latter of embarking on white elephant projects rather than life-impacting social services.
Firing the first salvo, Mr. Clement Agba, the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning had, while briefing correspondents at the State House shortly after the weekly Federal Executive Council meeting in Abuja attributed the poverty rate to governors’ misplaced priority.
Agba said the governors prioritised the construction of infrastructure, such as bridges and airports in cities, rather than improving the lives of the people in rural communities, adding that State governors chose to expend State resources on the capital cities.
“The governors are basically functioning in their State capitals. And a democracy that we preach about is delivering the greatest goods to the greatest number of people. And our demography shows that the greatest number of our people live in rural areas, but the governors are not working in the rural areas.
“I think from the Federal Government’s side, we are doing our best. But we need to say that rather than governors continuing to compete to take loans to build airports that are not necessary, where they have other airports so close to them, or governors now competing to build flyovers all over the place, we appeal that they should concentrate on building rural roads so that the farmer can at least get their products to the market,” he said.
Reacting to the Federal Government’s claim that they were responsible for the poverty among Nigerians, State Governors, under the umbrella of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, stated that the Federal Government has the blame for the rising poverty level among Nigerians.
The NGF said the rising level of poverty in the country was a consequence of the biting effect of insecurity on commercial and agricultural activities.
NGF blamed FG for abandoning its duty of addressing the security challenges crippling economic activities in the country.
The NGF also alleged that the Federal Government’s inaction had allowed bandits, insurgents, and kidnappers to turn the country into a killing field.
“This dereliction of duty from the centre is the main reason why people have been unable to engage in regular agrarian activity and commerce. Today, rural areas are insecure, markets are unsafe, travel surety is improbable, and life for the common people generally is harsh and brutish.
“How can a defenceless rural population maintain a sustainable lifestyle of peace and harmony when their lives are cut prematurely, and they wallow permanently in danger? How does a minister whose government has been unable to ensure security, law, and order have the temerity to blame governors?” it said in a statement.
Global best practice
According to the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022, as many as 415 million people exited multidimensional poverty in India in 15 years from 2005/06 to 2019/21 with the incidence of poverty showing a steep decline from 55.1% to 16.4%.
Way forward
According to Mazi Okechukwu Unegbu, lawyer, arbitrator and stockbroker, there is a need to adopt a multi-prong approach to eradicating poverty in Nigeria.
The first option, he said, is for individuals to seek a way out on their own. “I think what we should start doing now is to help reduce the level of poverty as much as possible at either the personal level as well as the national level. At an individual level, try and see how you can help yourself to come out of poverty by being productive. Argentina, Bangladesh and Brazil are doing everything humanly possible to get out of poverty.”
The government, he stressed, “Needs to ensure that the environment is good for people to thrive in business. You can’t get out of the poverty trap by going to prayer crusades in the church or mosque. No. Energise the economy by making sure you address the issue of unemployment. The government should try to release funds to assist small businesses like the MSMEs, SMEs, etc.”
On the authenticity of the NBS report, Unegbu said it only validates what other global institutions like the World Bank, the United Nations and IMF have been saying about the parlous state of Nigeria’s economy.
“I even feel the NBS report may have been moderated a bit. The important thing to note however is that with what the NBS has said, it means the situation is really messier than we think.”
At the risk of accusing the state government of dereliction of duty, Unegbu who is the currently Managing Director/Chief Executive, Maxifund Investments and Securities Plc., said, “When I looked at the statistics of the funds released to the coffers of the state governments, I marveled at the fact that they have been receiving lots of funds lately. Unfortunately, the LGAs are just there to pay salaries. The state government seizes their allocations. If we can address the problem from the grassroots, I think it will go a long way. The LGA s should be given financial autonomy of some sorts. That way we can easily question them if they are not doing enough.”
