Poverty reduction in war zones yields suboptimal results
It is no longer an issue for debate that majority of Nigerians are not part of the economic prosperity of their country. That is a sad reality of our time. Despite the massive growth, consistently recorded over several years, a lot of people are standing on the side-lines and listening to the sweet and dizzying story of economic growth in their country. They hardly feel the fruits of growth. Growth without development (that’s what it is) happens often, especially in economies driven by enclave sectors like oil, and when the people are not the central issue in governance. An inclusive society is one that promotes citizen’s participation in its economic, financial and political-social activities. Such a society offers adequate opportunities to all citizens to produce and share in the national cake. An inclusive society is economically democratized.
Another reality of our society is that over 40 million Nigerians have nothing to do with the banks.They have no access to the services of banks. They are said to be excluded from the financial system. And these two features of our system are not discoveries or new developments that just happened. They have been with us for a long while. Therefore, those in PDP have no reason to gloat at the facts, and those on the driving seat at the moment, the APC, need not worry, when these points are made. It is not for the good of the opposition nor a point against the incumbent. This has been the reality of the Nigerian condition for decades, albeit progressively deteriorating from one administration to the other. Progressive immiseration of the people is a natural consequence of doing the same wrong thing every time, and refusing or failing to see the error.
As I have said elsewhere in this column, what political leaders do in Nigeria is to push the can. Nobody really picks it up to see what is inside that is creating so much problem, and then decisively try to resolve it. Or how does one explain the fact that power outages, which are a Taboo in Ghana, is normal in Africa’s largest economy? Is it because two past leaders of Ghana (Prime Minister Dr K.A. Busia and President John Kufour were all students at prestigious Oxford University in England where power outage is an exception while those of Nigeria and those of Nigeria studies with lanterns. In Nigeria, politicians only heckle those in power out of office and once they get into power, their standard of performance becomes the failuresof the administration they replaced. And this is not an APC creation. From the time of Muritala Mohammed the trend has been to demonise those in power, get them out and point to their non-performance as a benchmark for your own failure.They should not be queried about anything they failed to do as long as the deposed administration didn’t do it better.
When we discovered that the military did not mean well for Nigeria, the term looting the treasury was coined to characterize what they were doing with public revenue. They had fallen into the same sins for which they seized power by force. So we chased them out and installed civilian regimes that ended up more profligate and corrupt than the military. Since then, irrespective of tribe and tongue, Nigerians have been worse for it. The reasons are simple. First it is the same people we chase out of one administration that constitute the sole of the next because there is no ideological boundaries in Nigerian politics. Second, we have a political structure that swallows anything good; anything honourable, and vomits the dregs of the earth. Hence, many Nigerians, especially in the rural areas, pass through this life without anything good to say about their citizenship – a phenomenon they never understood, having had no real contact with government and the benefits of surrendering their collective sovereignty to the state.
These economically excluded Nigerians are at best, observers of the prosperity of their country having been structured to the periphery of the economic goings on. At worst they are poor, sick, and ignorant; and probably all of those combined in Africa’s richest country. They are the ones often haunted by the establishment, for one non-existent crime or the other. They are also the ones, who, as passengers of the ubiquitous okada rides all over town, are frequently fatally knocked down or badly wounded in the numerous city ride accidents we witness. And if that fails and they escape accidents, they are molested and randomly shot for refusing to pay N20 to the police at illegal checkpoints. They are also the ones that are regularly arrested and their wares confiscated by urban renewal and environmental sanitation marshals of governments that failed to provide for their well-being, in the first instance, but turn round to wonder why they engage is survivalist activates, like street trading. These are the excluded citizens, in whose interest government has established microfinance banking system which operators have sadly turned to microcommercial banking- doing the same old wrong things that made the banks fail.
Nigeria has an adult population of over 96.4 million of which about 60 million live in the rural areas. About 23 million of these adults have no formal education and mostly dependent on subsistent businesses and farming. A large proportion of the people operate in the informal sector having little or no dealings with formal sector institutions, such as banks and insurance companies. Our inherited colonial past compels certain attributes for beneficial interaction in the formal sector, including some level of education. This has been one of the push factors driving the people away from the banks, insurance companies and other nonbank financial intermediaries. Accordingly, the ranks of those financially excluded remains very high despite fairly extensive efforts of government at improving the situation.
At 41.6 per cent, financial exclusion Nigeria is lagging behind Rwanda at 11 per cent, South Africa at 13 per cent, Ghana at 25 per cent and Kenya at 17 per cent. In like manner, the number of Nigerians living in poverty has continued to rise. From 17.1million in 1980, the number had risen to 112.5million in 2010, according to the survey carried out by the National Bureau of Statistics. It was in reaction to the continued slide into poverty of a large part of the Nigerian population that government in 2005 introduced the policy on microfinance as a poverty reduction strategy. It has since followed this up with the creation of several financial facilities targeted at the informal sector and the introduction of some legislation innovations to drive the process. A collateral Registry is now available to facilitate the use of movable assets as collateral for loans. Great efforts!
The challenge now is that it is difficult to talk about poverty alleviation as the country is engaged in a war that regularly turns out large numbers of destitutes. It has also become very difficult to evaluate the success of such programmes as many countervailing forces continue to work against our poverty reductionefforts. Some have even suggested that it is no use talking about poverty reduction in this state of war. Boko Haram attacks, which have been complemented by the Fulaniherdsmendestroying farms and farming villages, makes a mess of our poverty reduction efforts.The war breeds destitution in geometric progression while we curb poverty in arithmetic progression. We must end the killing of innocent Nigerians if we are to reduce economic exclusion in Nigeria.
Emeka Osuji