The extreme poverty challenge

Poverty is a global challenge. Every country faces it. So, does our country. And every country fights it. Because poverty is not just a personal or private matter of some unlucky men and women and their children being condemned to a mere existence, managing only to survive while others live. 

Poverty is deleterious to the health of all nations. It is a drag on national progress and development. It dichotomises the society. And it remains an ever present and disturbing danger in nations big and small, rich and poor. It is difficult to forget that because after all we all devote our daily lives to the struggle not to fall into the murk of poverty.

The world used to know the poor as those who managed to survive on less than one US dollar a day on the average. But there is now a new category of the poor. These are those who are not just poor but are extremely poor. In Nigeria, they are known as the poorest of the poor. Their emergence has jolted mankind. It is bad enough to fight simple poverty. I would imagine that fighting extreme poverty would be extremely tough on nations with a huge number of them. 

India had the highest number of the extremely poor with 74 million people duly certified. I thought this was inevitable. As of 2016, there were 1.324 billion Indians in India. Since the room at the top of the social totem pole could accommodate only so many, it should follow that the bottom of the ladder would be filled with the teeming Indian crowd. 

But if you look at it carefully, you would see what progress India has made. It has determinedly fought poverty and progressively taken millions of its citizens out of the poverty and extreme poverty bread line. If only 74 million of its 1.324 billion citizens are still trapped in the murk of poverty, it is unfair not to appreciate how far the country has travelled in making more room at the top for more of its people.

It did not achieve this impressive feat by miracles or by mouthing inanities that sound sweet but in reality are the shallow sound of the big people who want to make themselves look good. Its late prime minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, appreciated the dangers of population explosion. She did not think that the more Indians there were the merrier. She instituted a birth control policy to curb the propensity of the poor to do what rabbits do best – produce children at a rate that even befuddles them and imposes pressure on the country. The poor believe that it is their divine right to carry out in full the biblical injunction to fill the earth. Not so, said Gandhi. Today, her policy has worked. If she did not rise to the population challenge, I would be willing to bet that the number of the extremely poor in India would today fill the African continent to a bursting point.

Contrast our own country with India on this delicate matter of watching the poor progress to the next level as extremely poor. There are 198 million of us. According to the latest report from the global poverty and development watchdog, the Brookings Institution, some 87 million of us are classified as extremely poor. Beggars on our streets and children out of school are indicators of where we are. The question, and it is not a cynical one, is: How did Nigeria, with a fraction of the Indian population over take India in the one race in which not many countries want to be seen as champions? 

The simple answer is that the Nigerian state has never had a strategic policy on dealing with poverty. We do not have a national population policy such as family planning to teach the poor the dangers of competing with the rabbits. Our birth control policy, such as it was, was mired in a needless controversy. 

The Nigerian state tends to see its response to the poverty challenge as a benevolent act by seeking to reap popularity from throwing good money at this headachy, bad problem. The Obasanjo administration initiated two ill-advised programmes on tackling poverty. The first was poverty eradication and the second was the poverty alleviation programme, as if poverty could be treated with pain killers. In both cases, the Nigerian state threw good money at the problem by paying N3,000 to a selected number of people who were not required to work for it. If one or both programmes had succeeded, there could be fewer, not more, poor and extremely people in our country day.

Unfortunately, the Buhari administration was sold on this Father Christmas approach to the poverty challenge when it went ahead to pay N5,000 to those classified as the poorest of the people. A couple of weeks ago, as of this writing, the federal government announced it would spend the $322 million Abacha loot on the poorest of the poor. The money would be paid “as cash transfers to poor homes through conditional cash transfers,” whatever that may mean. The poorest of the poor in 19 states would be the recipients of this latest largesse that may make political sense but makes no social or economic sense. 

I know of no nation that tackled its poverty challenge with hand outs to the poor. Given this well-oiled approach to the problem, it requires no rocket science to see that there would be a steady flow of the poor into the murk of the extremely poor in the land over the years.  The poor and the extremely poor cannot survive on government hand outs. What they want is a national policy that gives them a chance to realise their individual ambitions. Hand outs only aggravate the poverty challenge because they dry up, seeing the Abacha loot could not last for ever, the beneficiaries would have to contend with the sudden loss of income. It seems to me that the Nigerian state buys into this option because it portrays it as doing something about it. Sad, awfully sad. 

Mark my words. The next time the Brookings Institution releases its global assessment report many more of us would be classified as extremely poor. Perhaps, we could drink to an achievement the rest of the world would only look at and shake its head, dispensing pity on a country that treats its many challenges with a smirk.