While the president and his vice president have continued to blame everyone and everything else aside themselves and the administration they run, the material conditions of Nigerians have continued to worsen with approximately six Nigerians sliding into the extreme poverty gap every minute. This has conferred on the country the unenviable tag of poverty capital of the world, a tag previously worn by India. But whereas India’s case with its 1.35 billion population understandable, nothing can justify Nigeria’s position with just under 200 million people.
In 2016, the National Bureau of Statistics signalled Nigeria’s precarious situation when it estimated that no fewer than 112 million Nigerians live below the poverty line. But we hushed the bureau up, criticised its methodology and said the situation could not be that bad even as our government continued to blame others for our plight rather than acting with urgency to reverse the ugly trend.
Recently however, the Brookings Institution, drawing form data from the World Poverty Clock, affirmed the findings of the NBC even though its estimation falls far short of that of the NBC. According to the data, Nigeria now has over 87 million people living in poverty. Kristofer Hamel, Chief Operating Officer of World Data Lab, captures it better: “According to our projections, Nigeria has already overtaken India as the country with the largest number of extreme poor in early 2018, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo could soon take over the number two. 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. In fact, by the end of 2018 in Africa as a whole, there will probably be about 3.2 million more people living in extreme poverty than there are today.”
Of course, some of the reasons why Nigerians continue to slide into poverty in massive numbers are absence of social and health infrastructure, high unemployment rate, high dependency rate, security challenges and the absence of right economic policies and programmes that will be a catalyst to lifting people out of poverty.
While various vital infrastructures are absent and the little available ones have continued to decay due to lack of maintenance and the government has been unable to muster much investment, Nigeria has one of the highest unemployment rates in the continent, which sadly has continued to grow over the last years.
Meanwhile, Nigeria has a minimum wage of N18,000, which has remained unchanged since 2011. This has left the poverty rate increasing at a current 44.2 percent, as compiled from a recent BsuinessDay survey.
Illiteracy rate in the country is also one of the highest among its peers at 34.9 percent.
But despite these startling figures, and rather than acting in a coordinated fashion to begin to address the problem, the current government has continued to implement policies and programmes that are sending more and more Nigerians down the poverty line. For instance, the Nigerian government’s highest allocation of N1.4 trillion yearly goes to subsidizing importation of petrol for the consumption of its few rich and the middle class. This, to be sure, is far greater than its combined budgets for health and education combined. This doesn’t show the government is even aware of the problem not to talk about addressing it.
