Bill Clinton
President Clinton did not say anything new even as he took the critical path in expressing his thoughts on poverty and that it was responsible for the violence in some parts of the country. While his contentions on the cause of current violence is open to debate, his position is a significant wake-up call to a selfish and docile Nigerian elite on the need to do right by the people.
Once again, Clinton’s position is nothing but plain emphasis of the obvious. One of the ever-present and unifying factors in the country today is the widespread poverty plaguing the majority of the people.
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Although it harbours the potential of fuelling insurgency as witnessed in the Niger-Delta, those insurgents to their credit, did articulate their grievances in terms of impoverishment of their people and environmental degradation.
However, the current insurgency in the northern part of the country has a different set of logic: the insurgents want a Sharia state. This for sure is a tall order in a plural and secular society which Nigeria is.
Which, of course, takes nothing away from the urgent need to tackle the menace of want in the midst of plenty. Poverty in Nigeria is not a child of providence, but the consequence of elite misrule.
The sundry social problems in the country can be traced to a faulty monolithic economy and a leadership bereft of ideas and vision of nation-building. Abundant oil wealth, itself a huge national asset for socio-economic transformation, has become a sore point on the national psyche.
Successive leaders have not only wasted the resources of the country on some white elephant projects but also bled the country through excessive self-indulgence. Half-hearted efforts at diversification of the economy never paid off. The net effect is the alienation of the people and their relegation to abject poverty.
In the last one decade, social indicators about Nigeria have been negative. Transparency International (TI) has often rated Nigeria as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
In 2000, Nigeria topped the list. In the same vein, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has ranked Nigeria low on its Human Development Index (HDI) with life expectancy put at 52 years.
Recently, in a damning report, the Global Financial Integrity said between 2000 and 2009, illicit fund outflow from Nigeria stood at $182 billion.
By contrast, some countries with less or equal endowment as Nigeria have taken their people out of poverty. With strong commitment to poverty reduction, China has maintained a high growth rate for more than three decades since the beginning of economic reforms in 1978, with sustained increase in average living standards by World Bank benchmark of people living on less than $1.25 per day.
Brazil’s progressive social policy of redistribution has helped it achieve more rapid poverty reduction. In Brazil, the proportion of the population in poverty is significantly lower than in China.
Its poverty level fell from about 17 per cent to eight per cent over 1981-2005 with a fair annual rate of poverty reduction of 3.2 per cent. Venezuela’s unemployment dropped from 14.5 per cent of the total labour force in 1999 to 7.6 per cent in 2009.
Poverty has also decreased. In 1999, 23.4 per cent of the population was marked as being in extreme poverty, this fell to 8.5 per cent in 2011.
Nigeria’s leadership on a balance sheet, advertises macro indicators of growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which it claims on the average has grown between 2.7 – 7.10 per cent in the last one decade or so.
This information is sold to impoverished Nigerians by all means of propaganda advertorial in ways that accentuate the irresponsibility of the ruling elite. These leaders are, however, to be reminded that the economy is growing in GDP terms but people are not being lifted out of poverty.
Real development is one that is sustainable and in which there are infrastructural and industrial productivity as well as the improvement in the wellbeing of the people.
The prevalent system in which over 70 per cent of the annual budget is expended on recurrent expenditure largely in the form of remuneration and perquisites for top political office holders, is not one in which the goals of development are ever achievable.
Beyond the material poverty of the people is the poverty of ideas amongst Nigeria’s leaders. Successive leadership has demonstrated incapacity to articulate any vision for the country’s tomorrow.
They have failed to come to terms with the universal truth of governance: that it is about the people. The consequence of their inaction and paralysis is the prevalent social problems confronting Nigeria today. In the past, leadership in some parts of the country de-emphasized human capacity development and expressed evident disdain for Western education, which therefore created a fertile ground for perverted consciousness that has become the determinant of religious extremism.
Given the abundant resources at the nation’s disposal, Nigerians ought not to be helpless and hopeless. Unfortunately, the resources have not been well utilized for the good of the people.
Rather, they have been rampantly looted by the leaders, an inept lot on whose watch the country continues to bleed. So, while public officials mouth empty rhetoric about the country not being broke while mismanaging the nation’s resources, poverty holds the majority of Nigerians in its pangs.
It is a shame.
Source: The Guardian
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