Beyond president’s call on addressing poverty

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s call on the governors to tackle poverty must be seen as a call to accountability and responsibility. His call is quite germane to the current realities in the states. The current administration has favoured the states in terms of revenue allocations. Therefore, they cannot be swimming in trillions of naira while […]

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s call on the governors to tackle poverty must be seen as a call to accountability and responsibility. His call is quite germane to the current realities in the states. The current administration has favoured the states in terms of revenue allocations. Therefore, they cannot be swimming in trillions of naira while their citizens continue to wallow in abject poverty.

So, the question to ask the governors now is: where is the money? What are they doing with the billions of naira being dished out to them monthly? The president’s call was for the governors to use these billions to improve the lot of grassroots people, the ordinary Nigerians who daily bear the brunt of the country’s harsh economic reality.

But the issue goes beyond just a call on the governors to do more. Rather it is to have an enduring policy that can be followed over years specifically to address poverty among millions of Nigerians.

This has become imperative in view of the fact that we have been trying programmes which either collapsed due to the shallow thinking around them or are abandoned by a succeeding government for no apparent reason.

Over the years, governments have not seen poverty as a national problem, and so there has been no national policy on it beyond political proclamations. Succeeding governments, since the advent of the Fourth Republic, have come with numerous poverty alleviation programmes which ended up without much impact. It most cases they were used by the operators to enrich themselves while those that they were meant for remained poor.

We have seen the government paid N5, 000 per month to people selected as vulnerable members of society, but it failed to achieve any result.  Rather than help the recipients, such payments ended up creating a dependency syndrome among the groups.

There are many factors causing poverty in the country right now. The economy is not growing fast enough to create an enabling environment to absorb the growing number of job seekers.

Insecurity has put many Nigerians out of business, including farmers who can no longer go to their farms. A situation where people cannot go out to engage in productive activities can only be a breeding ground for poverty.

The governors must show, in concrete terms, how they plan to utilise the excess funds they now receive for the good of their citizens. Such plans must go beyond grandiose projects like flyovers that now dot the landscapes of many states.

The eradication of poverty calls for the deliberate establishment of policies to tackle it fundamentally. The federal, state, and local governments must play their parts. This must take off from the central government, which has the duty to formulate workable anti-poverty policies to be spread over a time frame within which verifiable objectives should be achieved.

Governments must work together to address in concrete terms the current level of insecurity that has virtually paralysed economic and social activities in the country.

While different people have given different interpretations to the president’s call on the governors, we are convinced that the time has come for our governments to be intentional about the fight against poverty.

They must evolve well thought-out programmes that address the all issues that inhibit the growth of the economy, address the lingering security crises and one that guarantees basic needs of an average Nigerian.

Our government must show its poverty-reduction efforts by results, as China has done. In the 40 years to 2022, China pulled 800 million people out of extreme poverty, according to World Bank reports. That accounted for 75 per cent of the global extreme poverty reduction within that period.

Nigeria’s case has been the opposite. Over the last 20 years, the country’s poverty rate has risen. In 2018, when we hit the limelight as the world capital of poverty, Nigeria had 83 million citizens in poverty, a number that rose to 133 million by 2022.

Clearly, then, this shows that lifting people out of poverty is doable. All it demands is political will.

While making this suggestion, Daily Trust is aware that the federal government does not have control over the states. Yet it has a duty to ask the governors to reduce the incidence of poverty in their states. Eradicating absolute poverty is the least that the governors can do for their citizens.