WEEKEND with Ibraheem Sulaiman
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According to a report released by the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, on February 13, 2012, one hundred million Nigerians now live in poverty, in a population of about one hundred and fifty million. In fact many more other Nigerians believe they are indeed poor. To be poor means that you live on less than $1, that is, N160 a day.
'It remains a paradox,' Statistician General, Yemi Kale told reporters, 'that despite the fact that the Nigerian economy is growing, the proportion of Nigerians living in poverty is increasing every year.' This war on Nigeria started more than thirty years ago and has continued unabated, growing ever more intense and ferocious. The National Bureau of Statistics adds ominously that poverty projection for 2011, ignoring any possible government palliatives, was set to rise further. In other words as far as poverty is concerned, there is no relief in sight for Nigerians, the war on its people by the privileged few and by its leaders rages on.
And so the standard of living in Nigeria is bound to deteriorate further, at an alarming rate; the gap between the rich and the poor will continue to grow ever wider, Nigeria itself must continues to decline inexorably: already it has become a laughing stock among nations. 'Many years after independence,' The Guardian [retrieved 22/212, 09:15pm] comments on the NBS report, 'the Nigerian state is not making progress where it matters. Our human development index when compared with other countries is quite low. We are behind neighbors such as Ghana, Togo and Benin Republic, all of which are visibly less endowed than Nigeria in terms of natural resources. Nigerians are frustrated and angry as their hope for a better future never comes. The root cause of our stagnation may well lay with corruption and the diversion of the nation's resources to a select few at the expense of the majority.' Other comments from various quarters suggest that the escalating poverty poses a danger to Nigeria as a polity graver and more imminent than any other that might be imagined.
Mahmud Jega attempts, in his humorous way, to put the idea of living on less than a dollar a day in a context intelligible to a novice. 'It means,' he says in Daily Trust [20/2/12] 'that most of those people we see toiling in the fields in the scorning sun from morning till sunset, all those hewers of wood who chop the branches off tough trees and carry it into the towns in carts and donkeys, all those men and women who drag carts full of water up hillsides, most of the nomadic herdsmen who drive cattle herds up and down grasslands and forests, all those motor pack touts, most of the praise singers and con men that lurk around and certainly all the almajirai, all of them earn less than N160 a day.'
In fact never in the history of Nigeria has corruption been so absolute in ascendancy, never has kleptocracy seen happier times. A situation of this nature is certainly not sustainable. Imagine the feeling of a mother who watches her child die in a hospital for the simple fact that she could not afford a bill just one thousand naira or even less. Yet she is a citizen of a country in which it is no longer news that one person or another have helped themselves with some billions of naira from the nation's treasury, without any consequence. Her child, an innocent, tender new citizen, with the full range of human potential, would have died in vain, a victim of an uncaring and callous system. Imagine a promising young boy or girl whose education is stalled and life prospects ruined just because their parents could not afford the fees, in a country, which if not for unrelenting theft and plunder, could very easily afford education for all. Imaging the pain of a young graduate, eagerly looking forward to the day when he will start a new life and a family, and contribute his quarter to the development of his nation, but who, for no fault of his own, is left stranded in life, without a job, without any movement whatsoever in any direction.
Warning signals are coming from all directions, pointing to the mortal danger that lies ahead if the situation does not change. 'You can't just have this level of inequality persist, that's what is fueling all this stuff [i.e. insecurity],' Bill Clinton, former American President, said recently to Nigeria's policy makers. 'It is almost impossible to cure a problem based on violence on violence. You have to give people something to look forward to when they wake up in the morning.' The Governor of the Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, has also added his voice, saying to London's Financial Times [30/1/12]: 'There is clearly a direct link between the very uneven nature of distribution of resources and the rising level of violence.' The Director General of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Muda Yusuf, has warned that the rising tide of poverty poses a severe security challenge and should be a cause for concern for Nigeria. "There is a correlation between poverty and unemployment; there is also relationship between poverty and literacy level. There is also a connection between poverty and the culture of enterprise; there is a parallel between poverty and corruption. Growing poverty can be a severe security issue in any economy and weak aggregate demand in an economy.' [People's Daily 15/2/12]
The real tragedy for Nigeria is that there hasn't been a sustained war aimed at eradicating poverty. And surely poverty can be eradicated. Brazil is a shining example of how poverty can be tackled, even at minimum cost, and what benefits are there for a nation that resolutely - and successfully - fights poverty. Brazil has within just a decade reduced poverty to only seven percent of the population and is unwavering in the goal to eliminate it completely, through its Bolsa Familia. Essentially the programs is aimed at breaking the poverty cycle by ensuring children whose parents are poor are educated and as a result do not grow up into poverty, but are transported into a reasonable level of well being and prosperity, mostly middle class. Tina Rosenberg calls it the most important government anti-poverty program the world has ever seen. At the moment it caters for 5.8 million families, that is fifty million people, thirty percent of the population. The poorest family gets just forty dollars a month, a child between thirteen and nineteen dollars. It is a small, 'heartbreakingly' cheap, elegant idea that has done wonders, successful on a staggeringly enormous scale.
Brazil has just recently overtaken United Kingdom as the world's sixth economy. John Kampfner [The Independent 29/12/11] does not hesitate to attribute this historic economic shift of huge implications to traditional economic powers to Brazil's successful war on poverty. In his words: 'First under the former shoeshine boy, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, and now under Dilma Rousseff, the country has earned respect for adopting a distinctive economic and political path. Its anti-poverty drive, La Bolsa Familia -which, under the slogan "opportunity not favours", provides income support for millions of deprived families to be used exclusively for education and health - is regarded as an important paradigm for poverty alleviation. [President Rousseff this week reiterated her pledge to take 16 million Brazilians "out of destitution". At least as eye opening has been the expansion of the middle class. Unlike Russia, which is almost completely dependent on natural resources, Brazil's wealth is more diversified - a mix of commodities, a strong manufacturing sector and services.'
If you break the poor, you break the nation. Lift the poor and the whole nation soars high.
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