Let The People Breathe…

On Tuesday, July 25, the red chamber passed a motion by Senator Akintunde Abiodun to halt the planned electricity tariff hike. After the prayers were passed, Senator Cyril Fasuyi (APC, Ekiti North) moved an additional prayer saying, “Let the People Breathe”.

However, a few seconds after the statement, we witnessed the video of Sen Akpabio laughing while passing the prayers ‘Let the poor breathe”. As expected, the clip went viral especially on social media with people interpreting the statement as the Senate President mocking the poor.

Responding to the mass social media criticisms, Senate spokesperson, Yemi Adaramodu stated that “Insinuating that the President of the Senate, His Excellency, Godswill Akpabio, was mocking the Nigerian masses with the phrase ‘let the poor breathe’, is dressing falsehood and mischief in an undesirable garment.

Truth is, however, the rich have been mocking the poor since time immemorial.

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Sometime in 1789, the French population was facing a bread shortage because of the poor crop harvest due to rodents, and as a result, were starving. The poor fed up with hunger staged a mass protest and when Queen Marie Antoinette heard about the scarcity of bread in the land, replied carelessly with “Let them eat cake!”

Cake, obviously being a more expensive item than bread just went on to show how out of touch she was with her subjects. With this callous remark, the Queen became a hated symbol of the monarchy which fuelled the French revolution and ultimately led to her (literally) losing her head a few years later.

It was precisely these kinds of ruthless proposals that Jonathon Swift satirised in his book A Modest Proposal, where he offers a serving suggestion of his own and flatly asked why the rich don’t just eat the children of the poor. The narrator wryly reasons that this would not only reduce the number of poor children, but it would allow poor parents to make a small income by selling their surplus children for slaughter, and therefore ease the burdens these parents faced in having to provide for offspring they couldn’t afford. He wrote: “… a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.”

“Let them eat cake” may be mythical advice, but history is replete with even worse examples of rich people proffering suggestions to the less fortunate on how to better deal with being poor.

To really understand inequalities and poverty one must also look at how they are perceived by the people who most benefit from the current state of distribution of diverse resources: the upper classes. They have a disproportionate influence in terms of individual and collective decisions – from ordinary choices on housing, school and employment issues to political positions – that contribute to the perpetuation or aggravation of inequalities, and to the generous or repressive character of antipoverty policies. The upper classes also play an important role in the dissemination of representations and of various types of arguments underlying the stigmatization of the poor. By more or less explicitly expressing judgments on what is morally respectable, culturally distinctive and economically valid with respect to the poor, they can either deepen and entrench social boundaries, or conversely erase or shift them.

So, in essence, the top 1% and the so-called upper middle class ultimately decide how the poor are regarded. As if being poor isn’t enough, mockery and disrespect is thrown into the mix.

However, Akpabio’s intentional or unintentional laughter isn’t the crux of the matter. It is the half-baked, unstructured and poorly thought-out poverty alleviation schemes that government dishes out regularly that should anger us.

Research has shown that earlier policies and programmes directed at alleviating poverty by different regimes have not made much impact for several reasons. Examples are, Gowon’s Accelerated Food Production Programme (AFPP), Obasanjo’s Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), Shagari’s River Basin Development Authority (RBDA) and Green Revolution (GR) Babangida’s Mass Mobilization for Social and Economic Recovery (MAMSER), National Directorate for Employment (NDE), Directorate for Food, Road and Rural Infrastructural (DFRRI) Better Life for Rural Women Programme (BLP) National Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA), People’s Bank of Nigeria (PBN) Nigerian Agricultural andCooperative Bank (NACB), Abacha’s Family Economic Advancement Programme (FEAP), Obasanjo’s Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP) etc.

And so on and so forth. Different song, same music.

All failed not because of poor conception and brilliant ideas, but on account of our haphazard, non-focused, unstructured, corrupt and selfish implementation process. Our ‘anyhowness’. Most often than not these programmes are hijacked by corrupt, selfish and self-centred individuals or groups within the domain of power. The resultant end is always epileptic, dismal implementation or performance of the programme.

I remember during the N-power scheme, one person I know, forged ten different WAEC results and identities to collect government money. Another person working in an agricultural bank started selling slots for fertilizer meant to be distributed among farmers.

A recent United Nations Human Development Index shows that some 71 per cent of Nigerians live below the poverty line. In terms of life expectancy, adult literacy rate, total school enrolment, maternal mortality rate, infant mortality rate, population without access to health care service, and population without access to safe water, Nigeria is ranked 161, out of the 174 countries surveyed (UN, Human Development Report, 2020).

According to the report, Nigeria, in terms of poverty is ranked 27 out of the 50 African states surveyed. This unpleasant development has been traced to the British Colonial Imperialism. Therefore, economists have stated that the solution to poverty in Nigeria lies in the country’s ability to break away from the colonial type of economic activities that emphasizes exports of raw materials, and importation of end products.

Even as a lay person whose knowledge of economics earned me a decent ‘C’ in my SSCE, these poverty eradication schemes sound very much like Ponzi schemes. How can distributing N8,000 per family reduce poverty? How did N-power eliminate hardship? How did Trader Moni eradicate hunger? How can one government project, that is changed every four years eliminate poverty?

Elimination of poverty does not depend on sound poverty eradication policies promoted by the government but on how well Nigeria can champion the call for the restructuring of the uneven, unjust and unequal global economic relations and exchange the world over.

These are conversations that we must have.

Nowadays, as fuel and food prices increase at rates not seen in recent history, and people are forced to choose between eating and transportation, the gulf between rich and poor seems wider than ever. The question is, what will be done about it? Surely it is finally time to stop blaming people for being poor, or trying to fix poverty with a serving suggestion? What people living in poverty need, what they have always needed, is for rich people to have a little less so everyone can have a little more.