•Material suffering by many Nigerians trumps our GDP status
In the heat of the euphoria over the rebasing of the Nigerian economy which puts the country at the top spot on the continent at South Africa’s expense, most Nigerians may have missed the import of the other sobering statistics released by the World Bank, which puts Nigeria among the top three countries harbouring the world’s poor. The figures, as released by World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim, puts Nigeria, with seven percent of the world’s poor, in the third place, behind India with 33 percent and China with 13 per cent. Bangladesh, harbouring six per cent of the world’s poor, is fourth while the Democratic Republic of Congo with five per cent is fifth. In-between the five reside 760 million of the world’s poor, of which Nigeria accounts for a frightening 53.2 million – nearly a third of the country’s population.
No doubt, the findings by the World Bank would merely confirm the reality of the wide chasm between official claims of superlative growth and the reality on the main street. After what was supposed to be a soar-away economic growth that has averaged seven percent in the course of the last decade –this latest testimonial – which suggests that nearly one out of three citizens still lives in extreme poverty goes beyond mere repudiation of government’s pretensions about achievement, what it does is to call for a completely new thinking on how to distribute the so-called gains of economic growth.
This is where we couldn’t agree more with the World Bank when it posits that: “Countries need to complement efforts to enhance growth with policies that allocate more resources to the extreme poor. These resources can be distributed through the growth process itself, by promoting more inclusive growth, or through government programmes, such as conditional and direct cash transfers”.
Today, what is no longer in doubt is that the poor are currently hemmed in by forces that only the government can ameliorate. Indeed, we do think that the problems are now of such magnitude that the current growth path, even with the best of results, would not be able to make appreciable dent either in the short or the long run.
The World Bank chief actually puts the global challenge in perspective when he suggests that “To end extreme poverty, the vast numbers of the poorest – those earning less than $1.25 a day – will have to decrease by 50 million people each year until 2030. This means that one million people each week will have to lift themselves out of poverty for the next 16 years. This will be extraordinarily difficult…”
For Nigeria’s poor, the challenge would appear even more daunting. At the heart of the challenge is how to lift the mass out of the vicious grip of poverty through the widening of economic opportunities, better access to qualitative education, quality health care, cheap and affordable housing and public transportation.
We see the World Bank report as a call to arms. Needed at this time are practical and sustainable programmes to reduce the number of the poor. Good enough, states like Ekiti and Osun – with their provision of stipends to the elderly – have offered the nation a template of the possibilities. Other states should borrow a leaf.
In the long run, the challenge is to get the economy revving at full throttle to create opportunities for employment and wealth creation. It is unflattering that an economy which claims to rank first on the continent and in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), has remained an investors’ nightmare – going by 2013 World Bank’s Doing Business Report ranking the economy 147 out of 189 nations; this is even when South Africa is ranked 41, Tunisia 51, Botswana 56, and Ghana 67.
