Ngozi Okonjo-Iwea¬la, minister of fi¬nance and coordi¬nating minister for the economy, on Thursday, said the World Bank list¬ing of Nigeria as one of the countries habouring the world’s most extreme poor is basically based on the na¬tion’s population and not a peculiar case.
Okonjo-Iweala said the phenomenon of concen¬tration of a large number of poor people is peculiar with middle income coun¬tries like Nigeria as she cited countries like India, Bra¬zil that are also within the middle income bracket but equally habour huge popu¬lation of poor people.
Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group, had on Wednesday named Nigeria among a few coun¬tries habouring world’s ex¬treme poor people, prom¬ising to help the country tackle the challenge.
Kim had noted that two-third of the world’s extreme poor are concentrated in just five countries, includ¬ing India, China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Democratic Republic of Congo and that if another five countries, In¬donesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya, are added, the total grows to 80 percent of the extreme poor.
But in a reaction on Thursday in Abuja imme¬diately after launching the Global Distance Learning Institute (GDLI) which she said would help promote jobs in the country, Okonjo-Iweala said government was mindful of the high poverty levels and working out dif¬ferent strategies to improve the situation.
“Nobody says that eve¬rything is fine but we are learning and where we make some progress like other countries, we should also acknowledge it.
“But the focus should be on the answers and what other countries are doing that Nigeria could learn from to improve”, she stated. She said Indian, for in¬stance, is a middle income country, but the largest number of poor people in the world reside there.
Speaking further, the finance minister said, “Most middle income countries even Brazil, have large num¬bers of poor people that is the reality of today and Nigeria is no exception.
“And the World Bank president also mentioned that Indian is doing well and it has a large number of poor people.”
She said the situation had led to implementation of so¬cial safety net programmes to help reduce the poverty rate in these various countries.
She recalled that for Nige¬ria, President Goodluck Jona¬than has mandated some of the ministers to jointly work out a social safety pro¬gramme for the country.
“So, we should not try to single Nigeria out. The phenomenon we have in Nigeria is we are growing but there are poor people is everywhere”, she added.
