“Between now and [2020], we must make sure that promises made become promises kept. The consequences of doing otherwise are profound: death, illness and despair, needless suffering, lost opportunities for millions upon millions of people.” – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

Nigeria, the giant of Africa, is a country full of astonishing contrasts in the midst of its vast natural and human resources. Besides oil and natural gas, the country is “richly endowed with a variety of solid minerals of various categories ranging from precious metals to various stones and also industrial minerals such as barytes, gypsum, kaolin and marble,” unlike other countries. Similarly, Nigeria is equally endowed with tin, columbite, iron ore, coal, limestone, lead, zinc, palm oil, peanuts, cotton, rubber, wood, hides and skins, and materials for textile and cement. Without a doubt, Nigeria is truly endowed with an abundant amount of natural and human resources. The country is also richly blessed and well-placed to be a model nation in Africa with a high standard of living comparable to what is obtainable in the developed countries.

Yet poverty ravages the country. Based on IMF data on Gross Domestic Product (PPP) Per Capita 2009-2013 and the recent data, Nigeria is on the list of world’s poorest countries in the world. Similarly, according to International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Nigeria is one of the poorest countries in the world. “Over 70 percent of the population is classified as poor, with 35 percent living in absolute poverty.” Commenting on the pervasiveness of poverty in Nigeria, IFAD stated, “…poverty is widespread in the country and has increased since the late 1990s. Some 70 per cent of Nigerians live on less than US$1.25 a day.” And the situation appears worse currently. It further reported, “Poverty is especially severe in rural areas, where up to 80 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, and social services and infrastructure are limited. The country’s poor rural women and men depend on agriculture for food and income. About 90 per cent of Nigeria’s food is produced by small-scale farmers who cultivate small plots of land and depend on rainfall rather than irrigation systems.” The percentage of people in poverty seems to be increasing with no concrete policies to avert the calamity at the state and local government levels.
Per UN, Nigeria continues to rank among the most unequal countries in relation to poverty, indicating that the population of the country in poverty is about two-thirds.

According to World Development Indicators database, Nigeria has a GINI index of 43.7 indicating that the gap between those living in poverty and those with wealth is huge and continues to widen with each passing day. In other words, Nigeria has a handful of people who control the wealth while the rest of the population lives in abject poverty. GINI index is explained to measure “the extent to which the distribution of income (or, in some cases, consumption expenditure) among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Lorenz curve plots the cumulative percentages of total income received against the cumulative number of recipients, starting with the poorest individual or household. The Gini index measures the area between the Lorenz curve and a hypothetical line of absolute equality, expressed as a percentage of the maximum area under the line. Thus a Gini index of 0 represents perfect equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality.”

In a somber acknowledgement of the ravaging presence and effects of poverty in Nigeria, these and other headlines abound: BBC reported on February 13, 2012 with an alarming headline, ‘Nigerians living in poverty rise to nearly 61%’ that in 2010, indicating that 60.9% of the Nigerian population lived in ‘absolute poverty’. Also concerned with the level and intractable nature of poverty in Nigeria, on May 20, 2013, Maram Mazen and Chris Kay writing for Bloomberg quoted W. Scott Rogers, the senior resident representative of the IMF in Nigeria to have said on May 16th interview in Abuja that “Income per capita has gone up yet poverty isn’t improving and we’re having a difficult time understanding why that is or how that could be.” The stunning reality is the past figures are congruent with the present data indicating the absence of long-term actionable policies to combat the problem from the past administrations. There have been no sustainable policies to address the problem.

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However, without a scruple, the governments in the past tried to tackle the issue of poverty in various ways without any measurable success. Grim reality reveals that despite the past governments’ well-intended poverty eradication programs under National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) and State Economic Empowerment and Development Strategies (SEEDS) and other agencies, a large majority of people continued to live in abject squalor while a handful seem to revel and inebriated in wealth. Today is no different because of the failures of the past to tackle the systemic nature of the problem. The phenomenon leaves one to conclude that the contraption for poverty alleviation needs immediate retooling. However, policymakers should not be discouraged; they should continue to find innovative ways to attack the problem in a sustained manner and hopefully the country will eventually turn the corner.

Nevertheless, one should not deny the fact that Nigeria is labeled as one of the poorest countries in the world. We often forget that once labeled, it’s much too difficult to erase such a label, especially when the country seems to validate the label through its actions or inactions. The problem of poverty is exacerbated by the inequality that is evident in the distribution of income.
While it appears that 90% of the wealth of the country is controlled by 5% of the population, mostly politicians, who bathe in and profligate wealth the vast majority of the masses seethe in poverty.

Most of the improvident wealth is not reinvested in the Nigerian economy thereby making matters worse. As a result, one of the factors the government needs to address in fighting against poverty is the inequality in the distribution of wealth; the disparity is alarming. Indeed, poverty in Nigeria has been an intractable problem in which its effects on the faces of the people could be ineffable. It would be lugubrious for the politicians to politicize a baleful and perennial issue like poverty. Poverty has human faces written all over it. It’s rather callous to pervert the gravity of poverty in Nigeria by politicizing it. Unfortunately, we know too well that the presence of abundant natural and human resources in Nigeria is not in question. Also not in question is the knowledge of the ravaging effects of poverty in the country.

What’s in question, however, is if the policymakers realize that the programs designed to reduce poverty have little or no effects on the poor. A more productive result could be achieved if synergistic approaches were adopted. To make a dent on poverty, local, state, and federal agencies should work in tandem to address all poverty-related issues. In fact, the solution to the problem requires synergy and not disjointed contraption that has no bearing on war on poverty.