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89m Nigerians live below poverty level, says minister
AT least, 89 million Nigerians are living below the international poverty benchmark of $1 a day, according to Employment, Labour and Productivity Minister, Alhaji Hassan Lawal.
The figure, which translates to about 70.2 per cent of the country's population, ranks Nigeria as having the highest concentration of people living in extreme poverty in Africa.
The minister disclosed this in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso at the ongoing Executive Council Meeting of African Ministers ahead of tomorrow's Heads of Government's summit on employment and poverty eradication.
"Poverty remains Nigeria biggest domestic challenge which has appeared in many shapes and guises. It has shown up as pockets of criminal activities and occasional inter ethnic conflicts; and has also emerged as deep seated phenomenon of corruption", he said.
Lawal also disclosed at the Summit that President Olusegun Obasanjo's administration was committed to reducing the poverty level in the country as a means of ensuring social peace and harmony. The Investment-led Poverty Reducing Employment (IPRE) initiative, according to him, lays emphasis on the acceleration of investment programmes in both public and private sectors of the economy as a means of activating growth, generating productive jobs and increasing productivity.
This approach, the minister noted, was adopted because the private sector had been seriously weakened as the engine of growth of the economy by the absence of a critical quantity and quality of public sector investment.
Lawal hinted that government would give attention to the key areas of the economy with high employment potential. These include programmes and projects in agriculture, small and medium enterprises, the informal sector, micro financing, labour market information, labour intensive public work programme among others.
"Since poverty reduction, employment generation and wealth creation are integrally related, a coordinating machanism is to be set up to ensure that a synergy builds up from reform activities in key relevant institutions and investment projects," he stated.
But worried by the failure of the past effort, Lawal said the new initiative was based on the need to break away from the past to avoid another negative result. "It therefore becomes clear that the core goals of growing the entire Nigeria economy in general and its components in particular cannot be realised if we continue with the status quo strategies and policies," the minister noted.
Lawal, who led the Nigerian team to the summit, said the current employment crisis resulted in the economic decline of the 1980s and 90s and the failure of the mechanism adopted by previous government to address the situation.
" At independence in 1960, Nigeria poverty rate was 15 percent of the population which translated into about eight million Nigerians. Forty-four years on, the population of Nigeria living below the international poverty bench mark of $1 a day is 70.2 percent. At the current
level of the country's population of 126.2, this translates into about 89 million people living in abject poverty thereby making Nigeria a nation with the highest concentration of people living in extreme poverty," Lawal stated.
Lawal blamed the collapse of investment and crises of financial intermediation especially a sharp fall in aggregate bank credit as some of the other reasons for the rowing rate of the labour market.
Also executive council of the fifth extraordinary summit of African Union (AU) Heads of Governments Summit, unanimously adopted the common positions of employers' and workers' in Africa that it is only the "presence of peace and security in the continent, that the much sought after poverty eradication through the creation of decent work can be achieved".`
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