According to the United Nations, poverty entails more than just the lack of income. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination, exclusion as well as the lack of participation in decision-making.
Evidence abounds that Nigeria has not been able to break itself from the shackles of any of these issues despite its richness in human and natural resources. At the moment, the country has come to be regarded as one of the poorest countries of the world as its political and leadership big-wigs have failed to come up with a tangible and practicable approach to tackling the endemic issue of poverty.
The number of people living in abject poverty has increased dramatically over the last 30 years as about 60 percent of its total populace live on less than $1.25 per day, the threshold of poverty set by the World Bank. In the year 2018, the World Poverty Clock tagged Nigeria as the world’s poverty capital, while ‘The Borgen Project’ described it as a third-world country where about half of its population lives in abject poverty.
The same article reported that “unemployment has skyrocketed as one-third of the population does not have a job while food inflation which has accounted for 70 percent of Nigeria’s inflation has also continued to compound Nigeria’s hunger and poverty crisis”.
In the same vein, the World Bank reported that over 45 percent of the Nigerian populace will live in extreme poverty by the year 2022. In similitude, a report by Statista revealed that 92 percent of Nigerians live below $5.50 per day. Nigeria’s high poverty rate can definitely not be separated from its poor macroeconomic conditions and policies. Between 2014 and 2021, Nigeria experienced a gloomy period as a result of the double blow of the fall in price of crude oil and the global pandemic.
A report by the World Bank revealed that Nigeria experienced its deepest recession since 1980 as the economy was reported to have grown modestly by about 2.1 percent in 2021. From then till now, its economic progress has not met up with the expected pace of economic recovery while the various macroeconomic reforms have not achieved the desired results.
The recently released misery index, which is a measure of a country’s wellbeing, is said to be a reflection of economic distress felt by Nigerians in the past years. According to the misery index as captured by Statista, Nigeria ranked 11th most miserable country out of a total number of 156 countries considered. Many people have agreed that one major issue Nigeria will need to fix to achieve the desired result is to vote in the right leadership.
Leadership and governance plays an important role in determining the rate of poverty and other economic trajectories. If there’s no good leadership, an economy doesn’t grow; therefore, poverty will continue to increase.
According to a funded research by the Department for International Development, governance makes a big difference to all of us as it determines our security from conflict, disease, people’s freedom to participate in the societies and their abilities to be economically productive, while the World Bank asserts that the quality of a country’s institutions and the prosperous state of its people are inseparable.
Good governance is an essential element to combat poverty because it makes a country’s political system work for the poor. It can be described as the central reason that explains why some countries have become rich while others remain poor.
Recently, the Chandler Good Government Index, an index computed annually to measure the effectiveness and capability of the government of 104 countries worldwide, ranked Nigeria as the country with the third worst government meanwhile its government effectiveness index was also reported to stand at negative values from 1996-2020. This implies that Nigeria’s governance system has been questionable both before and after military rule.
How poverty affects governance
Many people hardly include poverty as the root cause for Nigeria’s leadership crisis; rather, most opinions have majorly traced the root cause voter apathy, nepotism, corruption and a faulty electoral system.
While these issues are undeniably a contributing factor to Nigeria’s poor leadership, the fact is that high poverty rate should not be considered as an underdog due to the following reasons: Firstly, good governance is difficult to achieve when there’s extreme poverty and inequality as political exploitation is likely to occur under such circumstance.
For instance, while the 2023 general elections continue to make major headlines, accusing fingers have been pointed at different political parties for trying to influence voters’ decisions by paying them off.
Recently, gubernatorial elections were held in some Nigerian states, with the most recent being the one held at Ekiti State, one of Nigeria’s south-western states. A video circulated where some of the voters were allegedly being lured to vote for a particular candidate for as high as N20,000.
This form of ‘scratch my back, I scratch your back’ political approach is not a new phenomenon in Nigeria’s political space, if for anything, it has become a norm. Now, supposing each eligible voter is given the sum of 20,000 for their votes, dividing this amount by four years amounts to N14 per day, which is even way far below the World Bank’s daily thresh hold of $1.25 neither can it make up for the four wasted years of an administration that fails to perform. This goes a long way in demonstrating that wrong electoral choices come at a huge cost.
It is not enough for people to get elected; what matters most is to ensure that the right candidates are actually voted into power. The opportunity to vote for quality candidates should therefore not be exchanged for peanuts.
Also, it seems to be that people are deliberately kept poor so that they don’t break free from certain social vices that make good governance work. For instance, Nigeria’s elections have often been marred by thuggery and hooligan acts who engage in political violence based on ‘order from above’.
Available evidence has shown that those who engage in such acts are not those that belong to Nigeria’s upper class but rather those that have been at the receiving end of a poor and mismanaged economic system.
This stance is further corroborated by a World Bank report on fragility, conflict and violence that reveals that up to two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor could live in countries that are prone to violence by the year 2030.
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It is therefore safe to conclude that Nigeria has been a victim of poor governance because poverty has, directly and indirectly, affected its governance structure. Sometimes ago, Nigeria got tagged as ‘a failed state’ on account of its high poverty rate and rising spate of insecurity.
In the year 2021, an article by ‘foreign policy’ a US based media platform described Nigeria as a ‘failed state’ on account of the inability of its leaders to prevent the nation from sliding into further despair and failure. In their words, “only Nigeria can save itself but doing so takes the kind of political will that has so far been wanting”. It has become obvious that the major factor that drives the economies of nations is in their political advancement because it is the people elected that determines what happens in an economy.
While most developed countries have political and economic systems that are inclusive and offer opportunities for most people to create wealth, the same cannot be said of their African counterparts. Year after year, political office holders have failed to tackle poverty in Africa, neither have they been able to build basic infrastructures nor create growth propelling policies.
Rather, the state has rather embraced the approach of ‘giving people fish in place of teaching them how to fish’. Going by all these issues, it is imperative that policymakers make conscious efforts to create policies that will improve welfare and create jobs for the domestic economy.
Also, improving human capital development through the facilitation of access to quality education and affordable health care will all be necessary to bring about inclusive development and also reduce poverty, while its political class corruption will also need to tackle corruption by ensuring openness and transparency in public finances and ensuring a stiffer penalty measure is meted out to corrupt citizens.
