Reforms & Poverty
From: Madu Onuorah
The Federal Executive Council on Wednesday began
deliberations on the major plank of the 2005 budget.
And the President has taken personal interest in it,
to make sure their projections are in line with the
expectations of government. Clearly, the priority
areas have been listed to be in line with the
government's pet project - NEEDS (National Economic
Empowerment Development Strategy). Government expects
NEEDS to actually meet the needs of Nigerians.
Unfortunately, Nigerians are not enthusiastic about
pet projects again. Reason: they look around their
lives; all they see are graveyards of failed
government policies. NAPEP is still fresh in their
memories. Each policy is usually hijacked by the
parasitic elite. Because of their high level of greed ,
there is no trickle down effect of any policy to the people
that actually need it. The result is, despite laudable
programmes, the number of the poor and underclass
keeps increasing. Forget what officials of the state
would tell you, there is a lot of hunger and poverty
in the land.
Take a trip round Nigeria without tinted or bullet
proof vehicles. You will see millions whose bodies and
spirits have been maimed by poverty, existing at
levels beyond human decency. When not starving, they
are hungry for food. Most live without adequate
housing and medical care. Majority of these live in
the countryside and the city slums. They are the
uneducated, underprivileged and lack medical care.
These are the failures, the unskilled, the disabled
and the aged.
And their army of children, cousins, nephews and
nieces flock to the few people they know, like
leaches, trying to snatch even traces of decent living
from their "more endowed relations". And in these days
of GSM, they stay in the far flung of the country,
place calls to their "privileged and connected"
relations, daring them to reject their requests.
Maybe, because one had a dose of it, one has always
tried to study and understand the poor and poverty.
Michael Harrington, who did extensive work on poverty
and wrote the book, 'The Other America - Poverty in the
United States' had an insight. According to him, "the
real explanation of why the poor are where they are is
that they made the mistake of being born to the wrong
parents, in the wrong section of the country, in the
wrong industry or in the wrong racial or ethnic
group". For Harrington, "the poor are caught in a
vicious circle; or the poor live in a culture of
poverty".
Midtown, New York researchers described the poor this
way: "the low social and economic status individual.
They are rigid, suspicious and have fatalistic outlook
on life. They do not plan ahead, a characteristic
associated with their fatalism. They are prone to
depression, have feelings of futility, lack of
belongingness, friendliness and a lack of trust in
others". No wonder Nigeria is filled with skeptics,
cynics and pessimists.
Take a look at the data from the Federal Office of
Statistics. The proportion of the total population of
Nigerians living in poverty shot up by 66 percent (or
67million) in 1996, from 28 percent in 1980. In the
same vein, the proportion of the extreme poor (those
living on less than N6000 a year) literarily exploded
to 29 percent in 1996, from six percent in 1980.
Unemployment is still high (10.8 percent or 6.4
million people were unemployed in 2003). Although a
national poverty survey is in progress, projections
from the 1996 poverty data suggests that poverty
incidence could be as high as 70 percent. Urbanisation
rate (5.3 percent) is one of the highest in developing
countries while preventable diseases, including
HIV/AIDS pandemic are threatening the social fabric.
Honestly, being poor is debilitating, grinding and
dirty. The personality (mind and body) and spirit is
impaired. They feel more the stress of life - poor
health, marital woes, parental and work worries.
Misery generates social chaos. And it takes money just
to police it, to keep it from becoming so explosive it
disturbs the tranquility of the better off. That's why
so much more is spent on the police and security
agencies. That is why the pressure is on those who are
working.
The challenge for the government is monumental. The
impact of the reform measures will be measured, not by
how more of the rich got richer, but by the number of
the poor who moved up the ladder. Cutting down of
interest rates should be accelerated so that more
capital could be available for the expansion of the
economy. Unfortunately, we look up to government. Yet,
the move to half poverty does not lie with any
government programme. It lies with the small
entrepreneur having access to funds, establishing
business and employing people.
Government is actually the problem, not the solution.
The major source of corruption, in every land, is the
government. So government ought to be taken off our
backs. All the reforms should be aimed at this.
Government should be limited to providing only
infrastructure and enabling environment. It is time to
cut down on government. Its policies have never
reached the intended. It never will. It has always
been hijacked.
The lesson, sorry, focus should be - poverty is no
virtue. It ought to be stamped out. The government
reform programmes, though intended at the elite, first
dismantled the little safety net for the poor. The
challenge is how to put hope back to Nigerians, how to
put them back to work, back to respectability. That
way, we would have dealt a blow to hunger and poverty.
W.H. Auden put a spin on this. For him, "Hunger allows
no choice to the citizen or the Police. We must love
one another or die".
