The Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) has revealed that 47 percent or 92 million Nigerians are living in extreme poverty.
This is contained in a detailed impact evaluation report of the Think-Tank Group obtained by BusinessDay.
According to the report, unless Federal Government can partner the state governments as regards scaling social investment in the economy, the number would get worst.
In an interview, Senior Fellow, NESG, Tayo Aduloju, noted that scaling social investment and social protection was the way to reducing poverty but said its future should not be tied to political parties.
“Considering that Nigeria has a projected GDP growth rate of under 2 percent and a rapidly growing population at the rate of 2.6 percent, it is estimated that by 2050, the Nigerian population will reach 400 million. The government should therefore systematically scale social investment not as a party policy but as a co-national policy because of the number of poor people we have,” Aduloju said.
He noted that while the government had made efforts as regards initiative aimed at reducing poverty, but there were no feasible improvements that can be measured, “but we will say social investment on its own cannot lift Nigeria out of poverty.
“To lift Nigeria out of poverty, one must have a broad-based growth in non-oil sectors. China for instance lifted 600 million people out of poverty in 15 years and Indian in 10 years lifted 15 million people out of poverty. How did they do that? They did it by a combination of social investment and protection of the vulnerable, together with massive broad-based growth.”
He further revealed that about 30 million Nigerians had benefitted from the Government Enterprise Empowerment Programme (GEEP) as regards the Marketmoni, Tradermoni and FarmerMoni but noted that state governments’ partnership remained a challenge. He urged the government to create national programmes without vested interest that might overwhelm the programmes.
“We need to see big moves to draw capital flows that will expand the economy, which include all sectors in the market. The pace of growth so far has been sluggish and because it is slow, the rate at which we are lifting people out of poverty is sluggish as well,” he said.
“Nigeria cannot be doing 2 percent GDP growth rather 4 – 5 percent and to do that level of growth we need capital to come in,” he said.
