Wrong-headed

Oh my God! This government has fallen into the temptation of being a do-gooder. I suppose it wants to see itself as the new authentic champion of the welfare of the talakawa. Mallam Aminu Kano would likely chuckle in his grave.  The government starts paying N5,000 per month to our teeming poor population with effect […]

Oh my God! This government has fallen into the temptation of being a do-gooder. I suppose it wants to see itself as the new authentic champion of the welfare of the talakawa. Mallam Aminu Kano would likely chuckle in his grave. 

The government starts paying N5,000 per month to our teeming poor population with effect from this January. This Father Christmas monthly handshake is a veritable source of irritation in the management of the Nigerian economy. There is no way to put it delicately: the government is throwing good and scarce money carelessly at a deep-seated national problem that requires a pragmatic approach towards its amelioration. This payment will not solve the problems of the poor or the growing poverty in our dear country. It will only aggravate them. I am afraid this is not the government’s Eureka moment.

What is the objective of the government in doing this? Is it to court popularity so that  the APC becomes the real, caring party of the poor? In popular political wisdom, there is arguably nothing wrong with courting popularity. One good reason is that politicians need public applause as evidence they are trudging on the right path of governance. 

Public applause, or more correctly the applause of the poor, is a confidence-building mechanism. It says something about the possibility of re-election in the next election season. The applause ringing in the ears of the politician tells him he is doing what Napoleon could not do: carry the people along. But courting popularity is a slippery slope; always a slippery slope. The business of pleasing a segment of the society is always the product of faulty reasoning. 

I am still willing to bet that his government’s grand gesture towards the poor could not have been President Muhammadu Buhari’s idea because: a) the president knows that no nation has ever solved the problem of its poor by throwing money at them; and b) he knows that we trudged this path before under President Obasanjo. That government chanced on the idea that poverty could be eradicated by paying selected poor people N3,500 per month each under its poverty eradication programme. The programme was not the magic wand the president and his administration verily believed it was. It then changed the name to poverty alleviation programme. Same result.

Why would Buhari choose to follow the same path of failure and waste?  I thought he and his very brilliant economists would look deeply into our growing poverty and chart short and long-term programmes to tackle this slippery problem. Governments and people follow good and successful examples, not failures resulting from faulty reasoning and planning.

Why would this government, trying to pull the country out of recession, be willing to pay people who do no work for it? It is, I believe, against the labour law. At least St Paul is known to have ordered the Christian community of his time that those who did not work should not eat. There is unquestionable wisdom in that, sir.

What would N5,000 per month do for the poor? Would it remove him from sleeping under the bridge or in an uncompleted buildings?  Would it give him a decent meal for one week? Would it pay his children’s school fees? Or pay the maternity bill of his wife? We are playing with emotion of the poor. It is wrong and dangerous.

I am told that the government, for which read consultants, has come up with a list of one million poor people. Under the new classification of the poor for the purposes of this policy, these are the poorest of the poor throughout the country. Trust consultants. They applied their criteria to select the one million poorest from the poor. This, as the Americans would say, is headachy.

However you look at this policy, it is pretty much wrong-headed. It is not too late to drop it. It should be dropped without further debate. It would serve no purpose. It would neither satisfy the poor nor win the government plaudits. It is faulty in conception. I find it difficult to see why Buhari would want to continue with Obasanjo’s failed programmes. Would the additional N1,500 make the difference? Surely, this government is not bereft of hard-headed thinkers capable of guiding it away from courting popularity for its own sake by choosing to follow the path of waste.

If this government is interested in taking on poverty, it should bear the following points in mind. Poverty is not entirely about lack of money, although it is its most visible face. It is much deeper and more critical than that. Poverty is a multi-faceted human problem. Tackling it requires serious and well thought out long term and short term planning. A cosmetic policy such as this would only complicate and deepen the poverty problem in our country. And increase the rank of the poor.

It is a mistake to treat poverty as an affliction curable by throwing free money at the poor. Poverty, like all human conditions, is relative. All may be poor but in relative terms some are poorer than others. They do not have uniform lack or deprivation. Those who are poorer are not necessarily the poorest of the poor because even in that new group, poverty is still relative. Each poor person has crying needs totally different from those of other poor people. The needs of the poor man in Yobe are vastly different from those of the poor man in Rivers. Five thousand Naira free money a month may make sense to the poor man in Yobe but it would be regarded as an insult by the poor man in Rivers.

There are two dimensions to poverty. There is poverty as a parental affliction passed on to their children. It condemns such children to hewing the wood and drawing the water. But the more pernicious form of poverty is the impoverishment of the people, including the poor. This is usually as a result of poorly thought out government policies or even good policies that go awry. For instance, the implementation of Babangida’s SAP policy virtually wiped out the middle class in the country. This is always the most vulnerable socio-economic class when a country slips into economic crisis. A country that creates two socio-economic classes – the very rich and the very poor – invites serious problems.

By the way, I did a quick calculation of the monthly outlay by multiplying N5,000 by 1,000,000 poorest of the poor. My calculator gave me this scary figure: N5,000,000,000. Could this be correct? If it is, can the government really afford to lavish this money monthly on the poorest of the poor? This mind-boggling amount of money can be put to better use to give the poor a chance to struggle, like some of us, to make ends meet. 

I am beginning to doubt that our country is scratching the bottom of the barrel.