On Democracy Day, June 12, President Muhammadu Buhari spoke less about the challenges of democracy and more about the record of his uncommon achievements in his first term in office. It was good to know how truly Nigerian the man is, given his professional and personal relations with Nigerians in virtually all the 36 states of the federation. Those who say the man is provincial and clannish in his national outlook and appointments, can now munch their raw words. The man is as nationalistic as they come. Get that.
The president also told us what we wanted to hear: his plans, though brief in his speech, for his second term. He said he would continue with his anti-graft war and deal with trouble makers. Trouble makers is a euphemism for real and suspected enemies of his government. Those who are minded to rub the president the wrong way by words or deeds in their assumed exercise of their democratic rights and freedom do not need me to tell them to have extra eyes in the back of their heads.
The one item of interest I picked up from his speech was this: “..our government elected in 2015 and re-elected in March has been mapping out policies, measures and laws to maintain our unity and at the same time lift the bulk of our people out of poverty and onto the road to prosperity.”
Awesome. This, he believes, is doable because China and Indonesia had done it. Nigeria, like those two countries, is home to a pretty large population, 93 million of whom are officially classified as poor/extreme poor at the moment because they manage to survive on the equivalent of one US dollar a day. Our huge population cannot be a barrier to this national ambition. So, according to the president, “With leadership and a sense of purpose, we can lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years.”
We do not yet know for sure the president’s road map for lifting 100 million people out of poverty in only ten years. Perhaps we must wait for the blueprint to see how he intends to perform this admirable feat. However, without prejudice to the said road map, we can say a couple of things about it.
The first is that it is too ambitious. It would be nice to see 100 million people plucked from poverty in Ajegunle and transformed into millionaires in Lekki in Lagos and Asokoro and other choice areas in Abuja. But unless you make all poor people government contractors, that would be impossible. Taking ten million people out of poverty every year for the next ten years has the agreeable sound bite of political correctness. In this context, the president did not make a promise; he only made a statement about a problem that has worsened in the country under his watch in the last four years.
The second point is that it is not enough for Nigeria to attempt this feat just because other countries had done it. Nigeria can learn from their experience but it must guard against adopting the programme of those countries and expect them to work in our country. Nigeria’s approach must be sufficiently home-grown, taking into consideration our economic and social circumstances. Its anti-poverty programme must be grounded on something more tangible than the imitation of other countries.
Policy and method matter. Without such a sound policy anchored on a pragmatic approach, the Obasanjo administration threw good money at a bad problem. Its two cynical policies of poverty reduction and poverty alleviation programme neither reduced poverty nor alleviated it. We should not take that route again. It is time to teach the poor how to fish rather than encourage them to depend on occasional hand outs by the state.
The first step is to define the objectives of fighting poverty in clear and pragmatic terms and under gird the initiative with a law binding on all successive federal and state administrations to guard against policy summersaults. The objectives should target expanding opportunities and granting unimpeded access to the poor for gainful employment, including self-employment. That is how to systematically lift the poor. It is a process and a painfully slow one at that. Policies fail in this country because we ignore patience, time and process in our planning.
One cannot say it too often – poverty is an existential challenge in every country. No country can eliminate it but every country with a good plan and a determination to do so, can reduce it to a tolerable minimum. Poverty is more insidious than the absence of the Naira in the pocket. It is more importantly the lack of access by the many at the bottom rungs of the social ladder to the means of personal engagement in legal and honest economic activities. For instance, although banks exist primarily to fund economic activities, no bank would be willing to lend money to the road side carpenter or the woman who roasts yams by the roadside because neither the man nor the woman can offer the bank security for the loan. In effect, the banks exist for the rich because they can provide the necessary collateral to secure the bank loans. The opportunities are thus narrowed and poverty perpetuates itself such that the child of the poor man faces the bleak prospects of being mired in the poverty of his father.
The woman roasting corn and yams by the roadside represents the face of honest struggle in the country. So do the young people who are hawking peanuts and fruits in the traffic in our towns and cities. It is not their choice. Poverty is not a birth right; it is rather a condition imposed on people by a variety of circumstances, personal and external.
Yes, it is possible with a clear-headed policy on tackling poverty to reduce the daily exposure of such people to the mindless struggles that condemn them to a bare existence rather than life. We cannot make them millionaires but we can give them better opportunities to live rather than exist.
In his book, THE END OF POVERTY, How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime, Jeffrey Sachs writes, “The poor die in hospital wards that lack drugs; in villages that lack antimalarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water. They die namelessly, without public comment.”
Diseases ravage the poor because they lack the basic necessities of life such as available and affordable drugs in our hospitals and clinics as well as potable water. Millions of lives would be saved every year by ensuring that the poor have affordable access to drugs and potable water. These would make a huge difference in their lot. That is where the process of poverty reduction should begin.
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