“Nigeria has no business with poverty. With the wealth of human and material resources at our disposal, poverty shouldn’t define our reality.”
– Olusegun Obasanjo (Former President of Nigeria)
The scary, scandalous and literally screaming statistical data of an estimated 139 million Nigerians, representing approximately 61% to 63% of the country’s population, stewing daily in preventable poverty speaks volumes about our aberrant version of democracy. In fact, the painful paradox is that this is playing out in a God-blessed, oil and mineral-rich country!
According to this figure, as reported by the World Bank, it highlights how compounding factors such as high inflation rate and economic disruptions continue to impact households. But there is more to it than meets the eye. With the daily rise in the wave of insecurity, analysts using the root cause approach have traced it to poverty amongst other factors such as political dimensions, ethno- religious indoctrination and the culture of impunity whereby sponsors and negotiators of insurgency still walk our streets as free men! Something urgent must therefore, be done to scuttle the crush the widening wings of poverty.
That the poverty rate of the long-suffering citizens escalates while our political leaders live large; driving in the beast ( sorry, best) of cars, top notch planes and boast of exclusive yachts reminds us of the warnings given by the World Bank the IMF and the Economist Magazine of London back in 2010. They pointed out that the cost of running of government in Nigeria, including their humongous pay packages amounted to one of the highest all over the world.
