At the launch of the 2022 Macroeconomic Outlook Report in Abuja on January 25,2022 by the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), an alarming figure broke loose to send alarm bells chiming across the country.
According to Asue Ighodalo,Chiarman of NESG, estimates by the World Bank show that between June and November 2021, an additional one million Nigerians were pushed into poverty to bring Nigeria`s poverty headcount to a staggering 91 million people.
When the grim calculus is done, the figures would roughly be broken down to a jaw-dropping 91 million poor Nigerians out of a population of about 214 million. To be poor in Nigeria is almost akin to a death sentence. That is because, poverty in Nigeria does not just bring on a debilitating material lack but a lack of access as well: access to quality education, healthcare, justice and so many other things which go into the making of a content citizenry.
It is not for nothing that many of Nigeria`s young people will do anything to escape the strangulation of poverty and despair here. In a country where the only thing that works is corruption, to be found without the funds necessary to oil the wheels of corruption is to risk a living death.
In Nigeria, so many young people graduate from schools only to find themselves on a gradual but grueling descent down the slopes of poverty. So many young people who cannot even go to school because of the forbidding costs of education find themselves on these slopes much earlier. Many of those who try their hands on their own businesses soon find themselves out in the cold, run aground by one of the world`s harshest business climates.
Many Nigerians are faced with a system that sows and sustains poverty, one that seeks to widen even further the yawning gulf between the rich and those who are inexcusably poor.This dilemma throws up a load of questions.
But why is it that that number of Nigerians are poor? Why should millions of citizens of the most populous black country on earth and Africa`s largest oil producer wallow in such abject poverty? Has the Giant of Africa also become a giant spinning wheel for poverty? These questions beg yet more questions even as it beggars belief that a princely country that once held so much promise has now been reduced to a flailing pauper.
That 91 million Nigerians live poor should prompt harsh questions about the fate and future of the country; that many children are daily born into debilitating poverty must be enough to prompt questions over the destiny of a royal country. It is simply cataclysmic that so many people are poor in Nigeria.
Why should countless children cry themselves to sleep every night in Nigeria out of hunger? Why should countless Nigerian children have to trek miles to school every day mostly on empty stomachs? Why should so many women and infants die daily because access to healthcare is painfully poor? Why should so many young people live with nothing to do because opportunities are painfully scant?
A country that fails to plan its national life which invariably embraces sound economic planning invites poverty and everything that brings on poverty. And in Nigeria, over the course of many years, there has been a deliberate effort to impoverish.
Corruption impoverishes children and their families across entire generations. When the structures that should sponsor and support a prosperous society are dismantled by the inordinate greed of a few because of the absence of virile institutions, what should go to the majority goes to the minority and what should fall the lot of the minority becomes the portion of the majority.
That is what poverty does and that is what corruption helps it to achieve. In Nigeria in particular and Africa as a whole, poverty is indissolubly wed to corruption and their union is cursed with the misery that runs riot across many homes in Nigeria.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
