Nigeria is currently acting as the engine room of a multinational factory that churns out abjectly poor people for the rest of the world to worry about. Reports say that over 87 million of her citizens live in abject poverty – the highest in the world. This is roughly about half of her population said to be about 200 million people. But that is not the big issue. After all, India was in that position a while ago before Nigeria.
Bedevilled by a myriad of problems that have proved too hard for government to resolve, Nigeria has taken over from India. The more frightening thing is that the population of Nigeria is expected to double by 2050, and so will the number of the poor, proportionately at best, grow but in multiples at worst. Besides, we are not really sure how many we are and that increases the uncertainty about the poor in 2050. However, what is almost certain is that they will be more than some very big countries in the world.
Nigeria has been engaged in several wars, including the wars against poverty and corruption, and lately the war against Boko Haram and bandits (insecurity). None of these wars seem to have significantly rattled the object of its focus. Both corruption and poverty seem not to take notice of what we claim to be doing, as they progress regardless of us. While the war against poverty has yielded minimal results, the war against corruption has failed roundly. It has been damaged by politics as corruption suspects have seized vital institutions that ought to hunt them down.
It is time for a complete review the strategy adopted so far in both wars – against poverty and corruption. This is because after several years of these wars, more people are hauled into poverty each year than before and more brazen acts of corruption are being openly celebrated. People under investigation for corruption are allegedly being elevated to positions that bring ant-corruption institutions under their control or authority.
The President has demonstrated his rejection of the current state of poverty by giving himself, and those coming after him, what looks like a monumental target to reduce poverty. He has promised to push 100 million of us back into the good life we once knew, over the next several years. While some pray for him to succeed, many are wondering how he plans to deal with the role of insecurity in promoting mass poverty in the country. This is because as he brings people out of poverty, insecurity hauls many more back. It is on this basis that some have already written off the plan as inconsistent with reality.
Without doubt, the growing unchallenged attacks on innocent rural dwellers, by elements considered to be foreign invaders in the country, will surely unravel any poverty reduction plan. The president needs to deploy an objective strategy to reduce the rate at which Nigerians become abjectly poor on a daily basis. Such a policy must begin by resolving the problem of insecurity through transparently honest policies that do not create suspicion or harbour the seed of bigger national crises in the future.
Statistics show that about six Nigerians become abjectly poor every minute. This presupposes that to remain where we are, the president should bring an equivalent number of people out of poverty every day. And that will not be a great achievement, nor will it even be possible, given the palpable fear that has gripped everyone across the country, of being attacked or abducted.
Unfortunately, the subnational governments, the mostly failed departments of the federal government, cannot be challenged to help or do anything about poverty and corruption. They are not used to solving any serious problems, nor do they regard the miserable people they continually plunder and deceive. The way the laws stand today and the way the wheel of the criminal justice system has been clamped by vested interests, a review of the whole anti-corruption and poverty reduction architecture is the only way forward.
We still run a system in which billions that should have been used to build Social Overhead Capital are wasted on elections that are rigged even before they are held; to elect leaders who steal like common thieves and make no pretences about it. The story of Imo state should make a great movie. The state is trending on the social media for what might pass for some of the worst acts of betrayal of trust ever seen anywhere in the world by government, if the pictures we are seeing are true. Whole household equipment and furnishing are stripped off government buildings, containerized and hidden away, allegedly by top leaders of the outgone government.
We still go through the ritual of swearing-in people whom we know have no respect for both the Bible and the Koran. We waste state funds to organize their arrival to government — one of those senseless activities we perpetuate in Nigeria that add nothing to the well-being of the people.
It is time to try social justice as a cure for the rampaging poverty in Nigeria. Social injustice is at the heart of our present crises, and its reversal is key to our national reconstruction.
We run governments that are so unwieldy that it is impossible to be productive or save money to fix the infrastructure that promote growth. The search for nationhood, which has apparently given way to the pursuit of sectional ascendancy, cannot deliver social justice. Yet only social justice can reverse the drift to mass poverty in the country.
Given the level at which people are helping themselves to copious portions of state resources, at all levels, and the impunity that reigns in the dispensation of injustice, it has become a thing of pride to cheat one’s countrymen, if possible, to get on the Forbes’ List of the super-rich without qualms.
Accordingly, it is not unexpected that those in government have become aliens and a foreign body to the people they swear to serve. As long as public officers are allowed to treat public property as their private holdings, today is still early in our days with social unrest, especially as politicians continually recoil from their commitment to the people. Reversing this state of affairs must be properly thought out and should be supported. It is no longer in doubt that Nigerians hate one another today more than ever before. The hatred among them today is palpable and exceeds that of the Civil War era. They are poorer than their parents and their children, if they still find a country to be called their own when this matter is done, may have much against the society.
Emeka Osuji
