Trillion-naira intervention schemes struggle to curb poverty

Ijora-Badia, one of Lagos’ under-served but high-density areas, was home to many industries such as Michelin Tyres, Total, and Mitsubishi Motors in its heyday.

A short drive away from Nigeria’s premier port city Apapa, the town is now faring worse, with residents facing a daily struggle to survive.

Lekan Ademola polishes shoes to scrape a living. On a weekday, he makes just over N1,000, but it costs more than that to eat; so he sometimes skips meals.

Ademola listens to daily news through the radio and knows Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, has rolled out different billion-naira poverty alleviation programmes since the country’s return to democracy in 1999.

“Many of the schemes are not deep-rooted or accessible by the poor,” said the 24-year-old, who sleeps outdoors and pays a fee to use someone’s bucket to wash.

“It has been a horrible experience I never expected in my life – knowing fully well that you are willing and able to work but can’t secure a job,” he added.

Fummi Kuku, a data analyst, was one of the thousands of Nigerians who came home to help rebuild the country after the country returned to civilian rule in 1999.

“I arrived like many others full of hope but had to escape because the struggle was real; the government intervention schemes were mere statements,” said Kuku, 35, who returned to the United Kingdom, where he is now chief investment officer of a venture capital firm.

Many others like him have left too, defeated by the dashed aspirations of a nation where 133 million people, representing 63 percent of the population, were estimated by the statistics bureau to be experiencing multidimensional poverty last year.

“Poverty is growing at geometric rates despite the government’s efforts,” Mfon Gabriel, programme officer at PolicyAlert, said.

BusinessDay’s calculations showed that President Muhammadu Buhari has spent N3.5 trillion on social intervention and poverty alleviation programmes since 2015.

“The government claims it is doing a lot, but it is difficult to measure the impact,” Gabriel said.

Under Buhari’s administration, the National Social Investment Programme was created in 2015 through the office of the National Social Investment, with the aim of ensuring a more equitable distribution of resources to vulnerable populations, including children, youth and women.

The office then created four programmes to address poverty and help increase economic development. One of them was N-Power, designed to provide young Nigerians with job training and education as well as N30,000 monthly stipend.

There is also the Conditional Cash Transfer programme, which directly supports the “most vulnerable” by providing “no-strings-attached” cash to those in the lowest income group, helping to “reduce poverty, improve nutrition and self-sustainability, and supporting development through increased consumption.”

There is also the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP), which is a micro-lending investment programme targeting entrepreneurs with a focus on young people and women. It provides cost-free loans to beneficiaries, helping to reduce business start-up costs.

TraderMoni, an arm of GEEP, was designed to provide small loans without collateral to small-scale traders or artisans that may not be able to access loans or credit through banks and traditional financial institutions. The two other arms of the GEEP were MarketMoni and FarmerMoni, targeted at market women and farmers, respectively. These were to improve the traders’ standards of living by expanding their businesses.

Instead of more people being lifted out of poverty, the World Bank estimates that an estimated 13 million Nigerians are expected to slide into poverty between 2019 and 2025.

The Jonathan era

President Goodluck Jonathan, Buhari’s predecessor, had what he called a transformation agenda, being a roadmap between 2011 and 2015, to address the challenges facing the country.

In 2012, following the removal of subsidy on petrol, Jonathan’s administration came up with the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme, popularly known as SURE-P, to address critical infrastructure projects and social safety net programmes with direct impact on the citizens of Nigeria.

But by 2013, poverty in the country had become so serious that about 70 per cent of the population was said to be living below the poverty line.

Read also: Nigeria’s debt per citizen hits N217,136 amid rising poverty

The Yar’Adua era

When the late President Umaru Yar’Adua assumed office in 2007, some of his seven-point agenda were geared towards addressing poverty. The Economic Commission for Africa, in its Progress Report, had observed in 2005 that there was an urgent need to address poverty around the world.

In October 2008, Yar’Adua said he remained committed to eradicating “any form of poverty and other related effects in Nigeria”. He passed away on May 6, 2010.

Although analysts described his programmes as laudable, the harmonised Nigerian Living Standard Survey in 2010 indicated that 62.6 percent of Nigerians were living in absolute poverty at the time.

The Obasanjo era

In 1999, during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, the World Bank released a report, indicating that Nigeria’s Human Development Index was only 0.416 and that 70 per cent of the population was living below the poverty line.

Obasanjo established the National Poverty Eradication Council, chaired by himself, with an Assessment and Evaluation Committee headed by his deputy, Atiku Abubakar, to be funded by a Poverty Eradication Fund, state and local governments, the private sector, special deductions from the Consolidated Revenue Fund as well as contributions from donors.

Despite allocating N6 billion as a take-off grant, specifically to establish poverty eradication projects in the states, Federal Capital Territory and the 774 local governments, not much happened thereafter. Not even the other poverty eradication schemes undertaken and funded by different ministries, which were allowed to continue, made much difference. Criticisms by analysts against the duplication hardly changed the situation.

After that, there were others. In 2002, the administration launched what it termed Special Programme on Food Security in the 36 states, and in 2003, there was Root and Tuber Expansion Programme, which was launched in 26 states, both designed to address rural poverty.

Before the end of his administration in 2007, other initiatives came up but poverty remained high. According to the World Data Atlas, the poverty rate in Nigeria was about 56.4 percent at the time.