Hussaini Abdu is the country director for ActionAid, a global movement with branches in 44 countries across the world. In this interview with RITA OHAI, he speaks on the rising economic inequality among Nigerians, gender violence and the politics surrounding the forthcoming 2015 elections.
The 2015 general election is around the corner and the much celebrated ‘stomach infrastructure’ as a means to getting people’s to vote has actually become a key factor in the polling process. What is your opinion on the value, or lack thereof, this trend will add in the development of the country?
Actually I have a very different attitude to the stomach infrastructure debate. I don’t like the way it is being romanticised and celebrated by the new government in Ekiti neither do I like the way people are also being ridiculed by the whole idea that they talk so much about stomach infrastructure. It is that tendency to seek for immediate gain that people are possibly describing as stomach infrastructure.
I don’t actually think that we have been nuanced in understanding what exactly the poor people are asking for. The politics of using basic necessities to mobilise voters has always been there but my crisis is that when you now celebrate it, when you now take it at the level where you think that is the only way that people can actually vote for you, I believe that you are insulting the poor and I think that the best thing to do is to respond to the vulnerability of the poor and set up good policy frameworks that will support them in the long term.
It is just like what we say in development analogy that instead of just catching the fish and giving it to the poor to feed on, the best thing to do is to teach the poor how to catch the fish. It provides him with a sustainable avenue to source food and he could get it anytime he feels hungry.
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Secondly, stomach infrastructure will increase corruption. Politics has become an economic venture where you invest and expect to reap the dividend. The dividend this time around is material. So you win elections and then you corruptly enrich yourself.
When people spend so much money to get people to vote for them, by the time they get there they will end up pocketing the resources they would have used to serve and that could undermine our development.
Your organisation is actively involved in trying to eradicate poverty particularly in this part of the world. Why do you think this is still a burning issue to deal with and what are the ways we can get to a stage where we are all economically stable?
Nigeria set its oil wells in the 1950’s and yet we live in a country that is very poor. When you have a country where 60 percent of the people are living below the poverty line, it is just unacceptable.
The level of inequality is growing every day and unemployment is actually expanding; this is despite the economic growth that the country has experienced in the last 10 years.
What we have observed is that the growth is not impacting on the lives of the people. This is not what we call inclusive growth and it is not an accident, rather it is actually largely a function of the kind of economic philosophy we espouse and the economic development model that the country embraces which tends to feel that the access and resources poor people get should largely be on the basis of the ‘trickle down effect’ not on the basis of inclusion. As a result, the investment strategy has largely been ‘can we invest in the rich and then have it trickle down to the poor eventually’.
We live in a country where the government doesn’t actually believe that you should fight poverty – they tell you that they are creating wealth, as if wealth creation and poverty reduction are the same thing, they are not the same.
Suddenly, I heard that the Special Adviser to the President on poverty reduction has suddenly changed his title to ‘Adviser to the President on Wealth Creation’…who are you creating [wealth for]? What about the aged people living at home who are past their productive age, which wealth are they going to create?
We just put around statements and names without actually understanding the issues and I think that the level of poverty in the country is deliberate; it is because some people have refused to do the right thing.
Based on your argument, government has some blame to bear on not being able to improve the welfare of its citizens. What solutions are you proffering?
What we are saying basically is that government has a responsibility; which is to create the right policy atmosphere that will actually work out for the people.
Nobody is saying that government should go and create all the jobs for the people but it has the responsibility to set up a policy framework that would allow for some of those jobs to be created.
I am not even particularly saying that government should start distributing food but they have to set up a framework that supports people’s access to some of those things that they need.
The blame the citizens actually take is the fact that they have not been able to hold their government to account.
Also the business sector is not philosophically accountable to the citizenry; it is accountable to the policies that have been established and for me this is where the gap lies and it is historical! It has been the attitude of the Nigerian State regardless of whether it is the military or civilians that are in power.
Businesses are empowered so that they can go on free privatisation sprees where they kill those organisations that have privatised. They take the money, share the facilities, destroy it and then they move on and nobody cares, nobody asks any questions.
Check the history of our privatisation since 1986. They take all the loans and facilities yet at the end of the day they do not use it well and it doesn’t benefit the country. I think is not helping us.
Your organisation is actively involved with advocating for and improving the welfare of women and children across the world generally, what are the ways the nation can address gender violence, child abuse and human trafficking issues?
There are different kinds of abuse. Some of them are harmful traditional practices which can include things like early marriage; of which Nigeria is one of the major countries where this is being practised particularly from the northern part of the country.
Denial of children access to education is also a major concern. There are huge challenges of child witchcraft especially in the southern part of the country, like Akwa Ibom, where children are easily accused of witchcraft and sent out of the house by their parents and as a result they are subjected to different kinds dehumanising treatment.
Violence against women is also one of our core areas of work as we try to protect women from different kinds of violence. Most of this violence is largely induced by the patriarchal nature of our society that tends to see women as second class and not too important to the social system therefore, they are subjected to different kinds of treatments.
Some of those practices have been deeply engrained in certain cultures and some people go to the extent of wrongly using religion to justify these practices. And then there are some that are even institutional because government or security agency doesn’t think it is important.
A woman is raped and she cannot afford to report the crime because when she reports at the police station, every police man or woman around there begins to laugh and ask her ‘Oh why didn’t you just allow him do it peacefully?’, or ‘did you enjoy it?’…all those kinds of things tend to increase the abuses that women experience.
The biggest hindrance to tackling this problem is that there are very few women in government. There are so many states in the country where you will not find a single woman as councillor. There are 774 local governments with a minimum number of 10 as councillors in them as a whole. And when you find a woman as a commissioner in some of these states, she is actually a commissioner of women affairs and this is simply because it would be ridiculous to make a man commissioner of women affairs.
Once our environment is unequal, your policies cannot be neutral because our policies should be directed at enhancing that equality. For us at ActionAid these are the things we project.
RITA OHAI
