By Ishaya Ibrahim
Lagos is Africa’s fifth largest economy, with a $136 billion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) based on foreign capital inflow, manufacturing, services, and $139 million monthly internally generated revenue (IGR).
Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, plans to raise the profile of his adopted city with an $18 billion refinery coming on stream in 2020, producing 600,000 barrels per day to end Nigeria’s fuel imports with a surplus to export.
The Lagos economy is bigger than Kenya’s, the pride of East Africa.
Scraping to get by
But many in the cities and suburbs of this cosmopolitan state of 20 million population scratch and scrape in extreme poverty. They live below $1.90 (N700) a day.
Families can’t afford anything other than food and shelter. They eat just to get by, not bothered about nutrition. They live in squalor settlements to beat high rent, even though the tenure of their accommodation is uncertain. The Lagos State government considers such settlements illegal and could demolish them at the shortest possible notice.
A number of such slum communities are in the suburbs of Ikotun, Ejigbo, Majidun-Ikorodu, Ogba, Kio-Kio, Pako, Ajegunle, Yaba and even Ikeja, the state capital with boulevards.
There is no proper drainage in these areas, open defecation is common, and the apartments are unfit for human habitation.
Betty Abah, the founder of CEE HOPE, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that protects children, especially in slum communities, stumbled on a disturbing fact about poverty in one of the slum settlements.
She discovered that many girls skip school when they have their monthly menstruation because they can’t afford to buy sanitary pads, which cost about N500, depending on the brand.
Some of the teenage girls have sex with men to go get money to buy sanitary pads.
“Most families that we work with are very impoverished. Their main priority is food and shelter. Sanitary pad is not even in their bucket list,” Abah said.
This discovery troubled her. After wide consultation, she found a solution – reusable pads. But the girls would have to be trained on how to make them.
On February 24, 2018, CEE HOPE took the bull by the horns by arranging a training programme where the girls were taught how to make reusable pads using fabrics, needle, thread, Mackintosh and absorbent.
Participants came from the inner and outer Lagos settlements of Makoko, Bariga, Monkey Village, Agege and Ikorodu.
“That is the reality of the poverty in the land, that millions of young girls and women can no longer afford sanitary pads for their monthly periods. Some of them use all sorts of things that could even be harmful to their health. But the one we taught them to use is a bit hygienic,” Abah said.
In Makoko, a fishing village on the Lagos lagoon, around the Third Mainland Bridge, with an estimated population of about 200,000 people, Abah found another troubling manifestation of poverty.
School fees are paid daily because proprietors have learned from experience that families are so poor they can’t afford to pay in bulk.
“The fees used to be N20 per day. Then, it became N30 and currently, it is N50 in most of the schools. As the child is going to school in the morning with books or slates, he or she goes with a N50 school fee.
“And yet, many families cannot afford it. I was in one of the schools recently and the principal told me that every day, they have up to 50 children that are absent from school out of a population of 400 pupils.
“And it is nothing other than no money for school fees for that day. And this is the reality. This is right in the middle of cosmopolitan Lagos.”
How poor is Nigeria
In June 2018, the Brookings Institute, a research outfit based in the United States, said 87 million of Nigeria’s population of 180 million lived in extreme poverty.
That sheer number means that Nigeria has the gold medal for global poverty index – almost half its population live on less than $1.90 a day.
Living standards metrics on which Nigeria’s poverty ranking is hinged, include nutrition and malnutrition, school enrolment and retention, access to basic health, water and sanitation, unemployment and insecurity.
On all counts, Nigeria’s score is poor.
The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) says Nigeria has the second highest burden of stunted children in the world, with a national prevalence rate of 43 per cent of children under five – which translates into 16.5 million children.
This is in addition to 2.5 million children suffering from acute malnutrition.
On school enrolment, government data shows that 13.5 million children are out of school.
However, the UNICEF figure of 10 million earlier released is no longer tenable, says Hammid Bobboyi, the Executive Secretary of Universal Basic Education (UBEC).
Nigeria also fares badly on water and sanitation.
On May 16, the Federal Ministry of Water Resources said no less than 50 per cent of residents of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) defecate openly because there are no public toilets. The situation is worse in rural communities.
Life expectancy in Nigeria is 55 years, the fourth lowest in the world after those of Sierra Leone, Chad and the Central African Republic, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF).
A survey published in October 2016 by the World Bank on Poverty reduction in Nigeria in the last decade showed that residents in Nigeria’s North East and North West are the poorest, those in the South West and South South are the least poor.
Poverty and crime
Conversely, the North East and North West have a higher level of insecurity than the South West and South South.
Crime statistics reeled out recently by acting Inspector General of Police, Mohammad Adamu, showed the link between poverty and insecurity.
He disclosed that 1,071 people died in crime-related incidents across the country between January and April this year. Out of which 767 (72 per cent) occurred in the North.
Out of the 685 people kidnapped nationwide during the period, 436 (64 per cent) are from the North West, Adamu added.
Chibueze Ezugu, the founder of Mavinta Tender Heart Foundation said that insecurity and poverty oxygenate each other.
“The six states in the North East are in fragile conditions. People that have their source of livelihood in agriculture have been displaced by the spate of the insurgency there. Communities that were thriving, growing beans, maize, have been thrown out of balance,” he said.
In June 2018, then Zamfara Governor Abdulaziz Yari shocked many when he announced that he was shelving his role as the chief security officer of the state.
This is a telling irony. A governor’s primary role is to guarantee the security of lives and property. If he abdicates that for Abuja to handle, why then is he in office?
Drugs, taking over the streets
Poverty in the land has also birthed another kind of lifestyle in the youth which fuels more poverty – drug abuse.
Statistics released by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) in April 2018 showed that two million bottles of codeine syrup and thousands of kilograms of narcotics are consumed daily in Kano alone.
Kano, famous for arts and crafts, and a trading hub in the North, is Nigeria’s second most populous state after Lagos.
How can this monster of poverty be tamed?
Successive governments have created a number of poverty alleviation schemes and agencies without positive results to show for it.
Governments inconsistent Poverty alleviation strategies
In 2001, the Olusegun Obasanjo administration notched up the fight by establishing the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) to train the unemployed in skills such as welding, plumbing, vehicle repair, tailoring, hairdressing, beads making and many others.
All of that lost steam after Obasanjo left the Villa in 2007.
When Goodluck Jonathan was president, he figured out that education would remedy cyclical poverty. He targeted the age-long Almajiri system in the North which imparts in the youth Quranic recitation, not job skills.
It was, therefore, no coincidence that Jonathan launched the pilot project in Sokoto, Nigeria’s poverty capital, according to NBS data.
Sokoto, the home of Othman Danfodio and of the Caliphate, is also Nigeria’s Islamic capital, where the sultan of Sokoto lives.
Jonathan built 165 Almajiri schools, all kitted with language laboratories, recitation hall, classrooms, dormitories, clinics, vocational workshops, dining halls and quarters for teachers in all northern states.
After his exit from office in May 2015, the Almajiris stopped attending school. They were back to begging on the street.
When President Muhammadu Buhari assumed office on May 29, 2015, he devised his own formula against poverty – return to the land.
Through the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) scheme of Anchor Borrowers Programme, Abuja has so far disbursed N91.90 billion to 412,037 small-holder farmers.
The result, according to the CBN spokesman, Isaac Okoroafor, is that 500,000 new jobs have been created in the rice sector alone, and Nigeria is now self-sufficient by at least 90 per cent, in addition to saving $5 million daily by not importing rice.
However, local rice is not readily available in markets. What you find is foreign rice, even though data from the CBN shows that rice import has dropped significantly.
Where, then, is foreign rice coming from? The answer is found in Nigeria’s neighbours, Benin Republic and Cameroon.
In 2015, Thailand exported 805,765 metric tonnes (mt) of parboiled rice to the Benin Republic, from where the commodity was smuggled to Nigeria. In 2016, it jumped to 1,427,098mt, and in 2017 to 1,811,164mt.
Cameroon imported 449,297mt of the staple in 2015, 505,254mt in 2016, and 744,508mt in 2017, much of which was smuggled to Nigeria, where rice is a national staple delicacy, consumed by both the rich and the poor.
Primary education is another tool Abuja hopes to deploy in combating poverty.
The government started a school feeding programme with a two-pronged objective: retain children in school with delicious meals, and support the local economy by buying food items from school communities.
The scheme was a success story in Osun State which piloted it on May 5, 2006.
In 2018, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said Osun had the lowest number of poor people in Nigeria at 17 per cent. In Sokoto, it is 89 per cent.
Abah recalled how a similar scheme in Sierra Leon moved up poor families to middle-class status.
“There was someone I met in Ethiopia a few years back, the whole success story of his generation is based on the school feeding programme,” she recounted.
“His father and relatives used to work in diamond mines in Sierra Leone. He didn’t like going to the mines and farms, so he was sent to a missionary school around. His attraction to school was because he was sure of drinking tea and eating bread and egg.
“And that was how he was able to finish primary and secondary school, and educated himself further. He works with the UN now. He broke the cycle of poverty in his family.”
But Abah warned of gaps in the scheme that need to be plugged.
“In some schools, like in Benue where people collect money to feed school children, they have never seen food in those places. Or if they see, it may be like three weeks in the whole term.”
Tame inflation, poverty will recede
For a renowned economist, Henry Boyo, taming inflation – the persistent rise in the cost of goods and services – is the only way to reverse Nigeria’s poverty status.
He said: “If you have the best possible car, and you switch on the engine, and you put the gear in reverse, and you keep pumping the accelerator to fire the engine, where will you go? Backwards of course.
“This is what is happening in Nigeria. We have for over three decades got the gear of the economy of Nigeria in reverse.
“You can never grow if you are driving backwards. And it will also make no meaning if you have additional income coming into your coffers because that will mean firing more fuel into a car that is in reverse gear.
“The more money we earn, the faster we drive in reverse gear. And when you are driving in reverse gear, you know that it will be emergency because you will be hitting everything on the road, and possibly your life may be in danger.
“Every economy all over the world, in whatever country, must be driven by parameters which galvanise economic growth. And those parameters are so obvious.
“First of all, you will certainly become poorer as a citizen if you are being paid N100,000 a month, and every year, within a five-year period, inflation trends at 10 per cent.
“It means that within five years, your income of N100,000 will only have the power to buy things which have the value of N50,000.
“If inflation is 2 per cent or 1 per cent as it is in civilised countries, you don’t lose the purchasing value of your income. But in a situation where you are losing 10 per cent or even 15 per cent and nobody is saying anything, then you will be blaming all kinds of things or juju or some grandma who was looking at you with some bad eye.
“Inflation is where the pain comes to you as a human being. Inflation will make you behave very foolishly. Will make you behave mad. Will make you jump over the bridge into the water.”
Boyo said the government must curtail inflation if it wants to grow the economy and reduce poverty because inflation determines the cost of funds, the interest rate banks charge on loans.
“If you bring down inflation, cost of funds will come down naturally. But we have a situation where, because of inflation, the Central Bank itself gets into the market fray of borrowing money out of the system so that the intensity of the pull of inflation will be reduced.
“They take the money out of the system to reduce too much money that drives inflation. You now have a situation where the real sector, the manufacturers and business people, are now looking for cheap money.
“Do you think the banks will lend to the real sector when the government is willing to pay 15 to 18 per cent to borrow from them? And is it safer to lend to a businessman at 20 something per cent?
“At 20 something per cent, what kind of business will you be doing to make a success to be able to repay the loan? So, you now have a cruel situation. When they tell you that Nigeria is the poorest capital in the world, they have a reason for saying so.”
Before we all drown
For many experts, taming Nigeria’s poverty is not a choice; with a population of 190 million, which grows at 3 per cent a year, and would exceed 300 million in 2050, and become the third largest on earth, taming poverty is a must-do. Nigeria’s survival depends on it.