Last Saturday – September 9 – the Daystar Christian Centre undertook its annual “Back to School” outreach where it gives out educational materials free to the vulnerable in our society. This year, I was made to understand, the church gave out over 20,000 school bags with educational materials included. My intervention today – beyond the commendable effort of the church – is the story a day earlier.
According to its senior Pastor, Sam Adeyemi, he got a call from his personal assistant late at night informing him that there is a crowd at the church gate. After the call, pictures of people stretching down the street followed to show the enormity of the situation. He was baffled and wondered what they could’ve been doing at the church gate late at night. Then it hit home. They were there to collect school bags the next day! The church had no option than to accommodate them for the night.
The outreach programme, which has grown over the years, was decentralised to cater for more people across Lagos. But he was told that people even came from Ibadan which is 129 km away. This got him wondering; why would someone leave Ibadan to Lagos just to get a bag? One of his pastors helped him out by explaining the probable reasons.
This worthy Daystar example – which extends to other areas – underscores the excruciating poverty situation in Nigeria today. During one of her numerous trips to our village, a relative approached my mother and gave her his eight year old daughter to keep her company as long as she desires. He complained that he could no longer provide food for her and her siblings and the most sensible thing to do is to “share them out.” The poverty level in most of our villages is beyond comprehension!
Unfortunately, this eight year old girl has a terrible habit of scaling the fence to go out. My mother did all within her power to reform her but to no avail. Whenever she takes her back to her father in the village, she always meets a tearful response: “so how do I feed her?” But fearing the repercussions of something evil happening to the girl and her taking the blame, my mother, after five attempts, had to painfully let go.
There are millions of cases like these in our country and what this tells us is that poverty is on the rise and the current economic realities has further exacerbated it. According to the World Bank, the major indicators of poverty are: lack of freedom of action and choice; lack of adequate food, shelter, education and health; vulnerabilities to ill health; economic dislocation; maltreatment by public agencies; and exclusion from key decision-making processes and resources in society.
Poverty is also the result of economic, political, and social processes that interact with each other and frequently reinforce each other in ways that exacerbate the deprivation in which people live. In essence, poverty is multidimensional.
In their 2015 extensive report on corruption and poverty in Nigeria, ActionAid Nigeria delved into the issue of poverty and the role corruption plays in its continuous rise. Relying on a National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) figure, they put the percentage of Nigerians living below the poverty line at 69 percent (112.47 million). It now stands at 71 percent.
The report titled “Study of the Relationship between Poverty and Corruption in Nigeria” examined the relationship between poverty, corruption and social crisis. It analysed how corruption affects different segments of the society; and the implication of these findings for social development.
“Given the country’s enormous resources,” the report stated, “it is puzzling that such a huge portion of the populace lives in poverty. This vast incidence of poverty in the midst of plenty has severally been linked to the endemic corruption in the country, as it involves the massive stealing of resources that would have otherwise been invested in providing wealth-creating infrastructure for the citizens.
“This perception is reinforced by an accepted position that corruption is a global incidence that tends to retard the growth of countries where it manifests. Corruption is also taken as having the tendency to exacerbate and cause conflicts, promote poverty, and impact negatively on the best use of human and natural resources. Some previous studies have shown that corruption remains a major hindrance to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.”
Nigeria is considered to be one of the poorest countries in the world because it has some of the poorest human development indicators. In a bid to tackle poverty successive governments have rightly focused on rural development. These interventions – which date back to the 1970s – include the National Accelerated Food Production Programme and the Nigeria Agricultural and Cooperative Bank (NACB) by the Gowon administration in 1972 and 1973 respectively.
The first Obasanjo regime came up with Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), an integrated rural development strategy proposed by the United Nations in 1976 which was followed by the Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme (ACGS) in 1977.
The civilian regime of Shehu Shagari came up with the Green Revolution Programme, with the main aim of curtailing food importation and boosting crop and fibre production in 1979. The Buhari/Idiagbon regime rolled out the Back to Land Programme in 1984. Others are: The National Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA), The National Directorate of Employment (NDE), The Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI), People’s Bank of Nigeria (PBN), Sure-P, YouWin, GIS etc.
In the end, these programmes failed to have substantial impact on poverty levels. They were rightly criticised for serving as conduits for enriching politicians, senior civil servants and military officers who acquired large tracts of land at the expense of peasant land owners.
Intended to reduce poverty in the country, most of these interventions had faulty designs and implementations. For instance, while some lacked targets, others had extremely ambitious targets which failed to consider technical capacities and budgetary limitations. In addition, the targeted beneficiaries had either very limited or no participation in the planning and implementation of these interventions. Because some of these intervention programmes lacked focus, they ventured into too many activities and became unsustainable.
Tackling poverty has been an age old battle, while others make inroads, the lack of sincerity and purpose has been our bane. Policies were rolled out as avenues to siphon public funds and not to really help the poor. The GIS programme of the last administration where names of fictitious graduates were used to fleece Nigeria is one classic example.
The question then pops up; how did other countries lift people out of poverty? China has shown that it is possible to lift 600 million people out of poverty within three decade. How did they achieve this? China invested in agriculture to reduce poverty and successful agricultural projects were built right from the grass roots. These were not top-down solutions. The Chinese government and World Food Programme selected the successful agricultural projects and implemented them throughout the nation.
Data from the latest survey in the China Household Income Project shows that China has all but eradicated urban poverty. For a country with huge numbers of poor people streaming into its cities, many of whom living initially in conditions of abject misery, this is an extraordinary success. It has been achieved, in large part, because of a government subsidy paid to urban dwellers to bring incomes up to a minimum level of 4,476 yuan ($700).
The question now is whether the government can repeat this success and eradicate extreme poverty entirely. The current economic and social five year plan (the country’s 12th) aims to eliminate all poverty by 2020 (10 years ahead of the newly agreed UN Sustainable Development Goal poverty eradication target.
China has lifted more people out of poverty than anywhere else in the world: its per capita income increased five-fold between 1990 and 2000, from $200 to $1,000. Between 2000 and 2010, per capita income also rose by the same rate, from $1,000 to $5,000, moving China into the ranks of middle-income countries.
Can Nigeria achieve this? Like the Action Aid report shows there is a correlation between corruption and poverty so we have to address the issue first. But is there the “political will” to tackle corruption?
