Thinking of Nigeria as a bastion of poverty seems a paradoxical absurdity. Something simply does not add up. How can a nation so prodigiously endowed with natural resources, so impossibly blessed with clement weather, a nation that still has sixty four per-cent of its land mass uncultivated, be fingered as being in the grip of extreme want and poverty?
But this is the reality that has hit us in the face with the latest report of the Brookings Institute. Nigeria has now become the poster boy for Biblical poverty and extreme privation in Africa. It is the greatest scandal of human development. If Nigeria was put together to explain why brains and ability matter over natural resources and hospitable environment, the explanation cannot be more convincing. Like a feckless and profligate child from a background of immense wealth, Nigeria has been toying with poverty for a long time. It has now arrived with vengeance.
Poverty is the condition of absolute human want which dehumanizes earthly existence to a feral fiasco. Anybody who has seen human-beings foraging for food in junk yards and refuse heaps, or taking shelter in abandoned dung hills can be forgiven for thinking that only a thin line separates humankind from their animal cousins. Indeed in conditions of war and extreme social stress, the line is often blurred, and humanity slips back into the state of nature.
For some countries or human societies, it never rains but pours. Problems pile upon problems. While we are still grappling with the problem of a federal executive embroiled in a bitter power struggle with the legislature and the carnage occasioned by the lingering feud between herders and sedentary farmers, while inter-elite disharmony begins to assume an ominous nation-disabling dimension, a more terrifying social and political incubus has crept upon Nigeria.
With the news this past week from the respected Brookings Institute that Nigeria has slipped behind India with eighty seven millions of its people living below the poverty line, it is clear that the ruling elite in Nigeria has been issued with an ultimatum to come up with a comprehensive blueprint for social amelioration and inclusive growth or face the grave consequences of mass poverty and radicalized pauperization in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.
Let the filthy rich gird their filthy loins in this land. Social vengeance does not discriminate. The goal is not justice but bitter revenge. But let it also be said right away that with the messianic populism of its henchman and General Buhari’s puritanical distaste for corruption, this government has its heart in the right place. But without theoretical anchor and rigorous conceptual scaffolding, messianic populism is just mere hell-raising without any foundation in concrete reality.
On their own, messianic populism and railing against corruption are mere protestations and declarations of desire. They have never lifted any society or nation from the intricate web and trap of endemic poverty. The government’s hasty dismissal of the Brookings report suffers from insufficient intellectual weight and empirical justification .It must therefore be summarily dismissed as lacking in merit.
To be sure, the thought of Nigeria being unfavourably compared to India may not be sweet music to the ruling party. With its abysmal slums, its fetid streets, suppurating open sewers and sheer human squalor, India often presents a picture of human society at the desperate end of its tether. But nobody ever imagined that it was going to be easy transiting from a superstitious and deeply feudal society to modernity.
Yet compared to the Equatorial distemper which roils tropical Africa in general and Nigeria in particular as well as the ethnically inspired ego-fuelled politics, India has many things going for it, particularly the placid nature of its people, the discipline and forbearance engendered by Hindi philosophy and a nationalist elite which shuns obscene wealth and its narcissistic display. More importantly, India might have been colonially conquered but it was never culturally and ideologically subjugated.
Poverty and the poor have always been part of the human condition. It is there in the holy bible as well as the Qumran. No human society has been able to completely eradicate the scourge of poverty. To ever believe that this is possible is to indulge in communist fantasy. Yet every sane and sober society has always come up with a strategy to combat the more extreme manifestation of poverty, particularly the problem of mass hunger and staggering idiotic inequity. This is why both Jesus Christ and the Holy Prophet were social crusaders and avenging titans against injustice and inequity, unlike the prosperity boondoggle of our modern day religious charlatans.
The history of humanity is also the history of human struggle against poverty and socially or politically inflicted deprivation. Injustice is a bye product of human advancement. As part of the socialization of humankind as a higher species, it became evident that certain societies and certain individuals were always going to be more adept at deploying human labour to valorize natural resources.
But this does not mean that those less adept should be allowed to perish or face extermination from sheer want and human fecklessness. The poor may not produce, but as history as shown, they can procure social convulsions. The rich cannot peacefully enjoy their rich cuisine without catering for the palate of the poor.
In the animal kingdom, it is the Alpha male, due to sheer physical prowess and superior intelligence, that provides solace, succour, security from hunger and marauders until it is dethroned by a more powerful wannabe. Things are pretty stratified and set in marble. A lion cannot give birth to a mouse. Nature does not succumb to abnormalities when it comes to security and the food chain.
In modern societies, the state is the Alpha male. As socialization proceeded apace, division of labour kicked in. From the revolt of Spartacus, the great slave leader of ancient Rome, through the thirteenth century Magna Carta, the great revolutions that concussed Europe, America and Asia, the most momentous upheavals in human history have been struggles against want and injustice.
Many modern societies, with ancestral memory frowning and rumbling in the background, have learnt their lessons from these epic rousing of the human spirit. Before the advent of colonization and nascent capitalism, it was easier to address the problems of hunger and extreme want in essentially communitarian and traditional African societies. Nobody was allowed to go hungry. The extremely poor were accommodated in the social scheme and could always scrape by. The Yoruba people famously noted that once hunger is banished from poverty then poverty is dramatically diminished.
But the insinuation of the capitalist logic of development with its new forces and relations of production as a corollary to the imperative of human advancement has spawned a new concept of ownership and a vast new global tribe of deprived and hungry people completely delinked from the food chain and without much prospects of social amelioration. Hordes of the economically disabled are routinely unleashed on society by the new mode of production. These are the people famously referred to by Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist, as the wretched of the earth.
To be sure, this is not a problem peculiar to Nigeria and Africa. An extant survey famously indicated that the best period to live in England was in the mid-sixteenth century or the Elizabethan Age. It was a period of literary, cultural and philosophical renaissance in which food was available to everyone. But soon thereafter as the Industrial Revolution began to take firm hold of the society, the sparks began to fly eventuating in royal decapitation in England. In the subsequent French Revolution the scarcity of bread featured as the principal leitmotif and casus belli.
The western countries have learnt their lessons. They have come up with nationalist elites that do not toy with the plight of the poor or the business of poverty amelioration no matter their party affiliations or ideological hue. In Britain, France and the United States, whenever right-wing conservative governments, insisting that wealth must be created before it can be shared, go too far in their social brutalization of the poor and in rolling back the state, you can be sure that they will be replaced with left-wing governments with a sense of social justice and state responsibility to the wretched and afflicted of the land.
Unfortunately, Nigeria has proved incapable of throwing up such a nationalist elite or a durable democratic state with structured and disciplined political parties that will correctly read the mood of the people. When Nigerians in their collective anger dismissed the PDP government in 2015, they thought they were electing a genuinely reformist left of centre party capable of redressing the thieving incompetence and social depredations of the ruling party. Three years later but for the anti-corruption drive and feeble capacity-rebuilding, their hope and expectations have not been met.
Going forward and as a way of plotting our way out of this historic eclipse of the greatest Black conglomeration on earth, we can now summarize with the Brookings report and the Indian paradigm in mind. Firstly, the objective reality suggests that mismanaged oil wealth has turned into a social and political doom for Nigeria with unearned wealth in private pockets fuelling obscene disparities between the very rich and the very poor which in turn propels savage anger, social rancour, ethnic malice, insecurity, the rise of deviant behaviour and social cannibalism.
Second, Nigeria is prey to an unproductive and endemically corrupt political elite which relies on rent-seeking and predatory extraction. Consequently, it is incapable of adding elementary value to our immense natural resources, not to talk of coming up with visionary capacity-building for engineering growth and boosting knowledge production through the judicious husbandry of human capital.
Finally, Nigeria is held hostage by a dominant political caste trapped in a feudal time-warp which is bent on dragging the rest of the country down the alley of medieval servitude and prehistoric peonage. Given the current political shenanigans and fixation with elections, unless urgent reformers rise up within its midst to rescue it from its historic miseries or sympathetic strangers combine to nudge it in the right direction, the Northern Question will continue to loom large in the consuming tragedy of the Black race that Nigeria has become.
India does not export oil. Unlike Nigeria, India is a fairly homogeneous country without the religious, ethnic and cultural fault lines which exacerbate political, social and economic tensions in Nigeria. The killing plains of Jos, Benue and Taraba, which are a function of colonial malice combined with cultural, religious and economic rigidity, are simply unimaginable in contemporary India. The Indian political elite shun obscene wealth and its garish display. This allows them to think productively about the plight of the nation.
Finally, India is blessed with an old feudal caste which sees the way forward in embracing the future and not in hugging the past. At independence, Pandit Nehru, a self-assured scion of the old Indian nobility and a Cambridge graduate to boot, decreed that if Indians could not produce their own clothes or come up with their own indigenous automobile, then let them continue to trek and walk naked.
It can now be seen why India with its humongous population is making steady progress in rescuing its people from the poverty trap while Nigeria is not. The Brookings report is a wakeup call and a warning signal. If care is not taken, Nigeria will soon be declared the worst place to live on earth. That would be a real shame, if we still remember what that means.
