For refusing to part with twenty naira, commuters and drivers have been known to have been shot dead on Nigerian roads by men of the Nigerian police. For two hundred and fifty naira, children and teenagers have been rented as protesters for which they ended up at the receiving end of police brutality.
For five hundred naira, street urchins were hired to disrupt protests as momentous as the EndSARS protests of 2020. For failing to come up with medical bills of less than one thousand naira, parents have been known to lose children even as families have been known to lose their bread winners.
For less than two thousand naira in Nigeria, votes have been sold and bought and elections stolen. In 2018, the Brookings Institution, in a report branded Nigeria the poverty capital of the world, knocking India off its ignominious perch in the process. Even back then, extreme poverty was said to be growing by six people every minute in the country.
It was an alarmed Mr. Asue Ighodalo, the chairman of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, NESQ, that stated at the launching of the 2022 Macro-Economic Outlook of the group that as per the World Bank an additional one million people were pushed into poverty in Nigeria between June and November 2021, resulting in a total of about 8 million people being relinquished to poverty in 2021, to bring up Nigeria`s poverty headcount to a staggering 91 million.
This grim figure means that out of an estimated population of 215,353,968 people, 91,000,000 live below the poverty threshold of 1.90$ per day. By any measure, this is shocking.
In 2015, Nigerians gave their mandate to Mr. Muhammadu Buhari to steer the country through extremely troubled waters. In spite of a somewhat disappointing performance, he was re-elected in 2019 and is now counting months to leave Aso Rock. His legacy as president of the country would seem a troubled one. With the benefit of hindsight, it may yet find some redemption in the eyes of Nigerians.
On August 21,2019, Mr. Muhammadu Buhari created the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development and appointed Mrs. Sadiya Umar Farouq as pioneer minister. The ministry was created to provide leadership and coordinate all matters relating to humanitarian challenges, disasters and social development in Nigeria.
In spite of some very notable achievements, the ministry and the minister have often been a lightning rod for controversy in spite of some very notable achievements.
In 2017, more than one year after it came on board, the administration of Mr. Muhammadu Buhari commenced payment of N5,000 monthly stipends it promised poor Nigerians as part of the Federal Government`s cash transfer initiative which aims to lift 100 million poor Nigerians out of extreme poverty. The intervention has since continued now coordinated by the Ministry of humanitarian affairs, disaster management and social development.
The intervention recently came under fire from a cross section of Nigerians who described the 5000 Naira monthly payment as insignificant given the crunch economic conditions in the country.
In her response however, Mrs. Sadiya Umar Farouk dismissed the claims as unnecessarily elitist even as she described how some recipients of the five thousand naira monthly payment shed tears of joy because they simply had not seen such an amount of money in their lives.
Aided by experience, the minister was spot-on in her response, for however one looks at it, five thousand naira goes a long way every month for the millions who live on less than 1.90$ a day. The minister even revealed that some of those who received the sum of 5000 naira were able to save out of it to give themselves more options in life.
That extreme poverty is the lived reality of many Nigerians is no longer news. What is and would always be news is how Nigerians continue to defy the many pitfalls of poverty to forge something out of nothing.
Wild mismanagement of Nigeria`s resources have seen years of plenty swiftly replaced by years of penury. Because corruption runs freely in the country, feasting on the absence of the structures which would see every Nigerian carried along in the distribution of Nigerian wealth, the gulf of inequality continues to widen with nothing but lip service paid to efforts to check it.
The grim result is that many Nigerians continue to slip into poverty with the heartbreaking result that children are born into poverty, live in poverty and die in poverty.
Paying five thousand naira monthly to the poorest Nigerians may seem ludicrous, but given the depth of poverty, it may yet be bearing miraculous fruits. However, it must only be the first of many steps taken to pull millions of Nigerians out of the clutches of poverty. Everything but the kitchen sink must be thrown into the efforts to stamp out poverty from Nigeria.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
