POVERTY: Nigeria: Can President Jonathan Reduce Poverty?

11 May 2011 : Omolaraeni Borisade [University of Ibadan Dept. of Communication and Language Arts]

Following his success at the Presidential election, it is pertinent to begin to examine President Goodluck Jonathan's ability to reduce the overwhelming poverty in the country. Without doubt, this is a country that is so much endowed with all imaginable resources, but lacks the ability to make her citizens happy. Consequently, millions of Nigerians wallow in abject poverty in the midst of plenty.
It is on record that successive governments since independence in 1960 have been making efforts to alleviate poverty and stimulate development. But it appears that past poverty alleviation programmes have not yielded the much desired results as millions of Nigerians could still not boast of three square meals a day.
It is sad that the United Nations human poverty index has ranked Nigeria as the 25th poorest nation in the world despite getting $300 billion in oil and gas revenues and development aid. Certainly, the causes of this unenviable profile cannot be divorced from corruption, bad governance, debt overhang among others.
The question is this? How we are going to continue under President Goodluck Jonathan government beginning from May 29? Can we expect a radical departure from the status quo? Does President Jonathan have a magic wand to reduce poverty in Nigeria?
In the past, we have had operation Feed the Nation (OFN), the Green Revolution, establishment of Directorate of Food Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFFRI), Directorate of Employment (NDE) among others-all tailored towards reducing national poverty, but did we succeed? Not really!
Now, is President Jonathan going to rehash all these past efforts or his he going to come up with fresh thinking on how poverty should be reduced? It must be noted that poverty precipitates crimes in the society. It is poverty that drives young ladies into prostitution and armed robbery. It is poverty that forces people into rituals and corruption.
I shall therefore be glad if President Jonathan makes pragmatic efforts towards reducing poverty. Development communication course in my discipline has taught me that poverty can be reduced if the programmes are rural-driven rather than top-down approach.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201105120441.html

POVERTY: Nigeria: Poverty Eradication through Agriculture and Enterprise Revolution

May 1st, 2011 : Peter Osalor

The story of Nigerian agriculture is best read between the lines of its political history. Africa’s most populous nation had an overwhelmingly agricultural economy during the hundred years spent under British colonial rule since 1860, and well into the first decade after its independence.
In the 1960s Nigeria was the world’s second largest producer of cocoa, the largest exporter of palm oil and a principal producer and exporter of cotton, rubber and groundnut. Working traditional tools and practices, Nigerian peasants contributed 70% of export revenue and 60% of GDP in the same period. The total food requirement was met almost entirely by local produce and agricultural imports were to the bare minimum.
Circumstances changed radically with the oil boom of the 1970s, as the discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in the strategically significant sub-Saharan nation turned its fortunes overnight.
The windfall transformed Nigeria’s agricultural landscape into a gigantic oil field criss-crossed by more than 7,000 km of pipelines connecting 6,000 oil wells, two refineries, innumerable flow stations and export terminals. The colossal investments in the sector paid off, with unofficial estimates suggesting Nigeria raked in more than $600 billion in petrodollars in the last decade alone.
Unfortunately, the obsession with non-renewables over all other sectors of the economy eventually turned Nigeria’s boon into a bane. New found wealth spawned political instability and massive corruption in government circles, and the country was rent asunder by decades of violent civil war and successive military coups.
Agriculture was one of the first casualties of the oil regime, and by the 1990s, cultivation accounted for just 5% of GDP. Farming modernisation and support continued to remain low on the list of national priorities as vast stretches of rural Nigeria gradually plunged into poverty and food scarcity. Deforestation, soil erosion and industrial pollution further hastened the down-spiral of agriculture to the point where it ended up as a subsistence activity.
The fall of Nigerian agriculture coincided with the collapse of its macroeconomic and human development indicators. With income distribution concentrated on a few urban pockets, the majority of rural Nigeria was left reeling under massive poverty, unemployment and food shortages. A widening urban-rural divide sparked social unrest and mass migration into towns and cities.
Organised urban crime became as real a security threat as militancy in the Niger-Delta region. Nigeria plummeted to the bottom in world economic rankings and Africa’s most populous nation acquired the unhappy distinction of having more than half (54%) of its 148 million people living in abject poverty. The World Bank coined the term “Nigerian Paradox” specifically to describe the unique condition of extreme underdevelopment and poverty in a country brimming with resources and potential.
The country was ranked 80th in a 2007 UNDP poverty survey covering 108 countries.
The transition to democratic civilian rule at the end of the last century paved the way for an enthusiastic programme of economic reform and restructuring. Nigeria’s urgency for inclusive growth was much in evidence in the adoption of an ambitious blueprint designed to reverse trends and jump-start a stagnating economy.
The Vision 20-2020 document adopted under former president Olusegun Obasanjo lays out broad parameters for sustainable development with the specific goal of instating Nigeria as a global economic superpower in a time_bound manner.
The 2020 goals are in addition to Nigeria’s commitment to the UN Millennial Declaration of 2000 that proposes universal basic human rights by 2015.
The realisation of these allied and intertwined objectives depends entirely on Nigeria’s ability to bring about inclusive growth by means of an entrepreneurial revolution, while simultaneously correcting massive infrastructural shortages and administrative anomalies.
Economies usually begin expanding with an initial agricultural revolution: The case of Nigeria however calls for agriculture to be part of a larger enterprise revolution that efficiently leverages the nation’s extensive resources and human capital.
http://www.thenigeriandaily.com/2011/05/01/poverty-eradication-in-nigeria-through-agriculture-and-enterprise-revolution-part-1/

POVERTY: Nigeria: Breaking the poverty cycle through entrepreneurial revolution

April 18, 2011
Nigeria is a country of absurd economic realities. The 12th largest crude oil producer in the world and the second largest economy in Africa earn an estimated $2.2 million a day in oil revenue. Yet, its GDP per capita, at just over $1,400, is among the lowest for the continent and 54% of its 148 million people live on less than $1 per day.
The figures are especially shocking because of the abundance of natural resources primarily oil and natural gas, and massive agricultural potential based on its climate and significant rural population.
Human development data for Nigeria has remained persistently bleak despite a considerable upturn in the country’s economic fortunes since 2000.
The UNDP ranked the country 80th in a poverty survey of 108 developing nations that focussed on severe deprivation . The agency gave Nigeria a Human Poverty Index of 37.3, placing it below more impoverished African neighbours with far smaller economies like Rwanda and Malawi. Significantly, the study looked not just at income destitution, but also at secondary aspects including education, access to health care, standard of living and life_expectancy. More than 67 million Nigerians are docketed as poor according to standard definitions, while 35% of the total population live in extreme poverty.
These recent trends are especially worrying because they parallel a significant but contradictory improvement in Nigeria’s macro_economic performance. Before the current global financial crisis set in, Abuja had been successful in wielding substantial positive change in its overall balance sheets through a process of re_prioritisation and economic reform since 1999. A slew of measures, including privatisation of several steel, petrochemical, mining and port entities helped develop the non_oil sector, bring down inflation and boost international currency reserves. Nigeria also successfully negotiated with the London and Paris clubs to do away with a large part of its foreign debt.
However, World Bank research confirms that even during periods of relative prosperity, poverty levels remained unabated in the broadest sense, and actually worsened during successive positive growth periods.
Between 1972 and 1980, for instance, the Nigerian per capita income shot up from $1,300 to $2,900 based on rapidly escalating oil prices.
A subsequent decline in global oil revenues dragged down per capita income, consumption and expenditure to critical levels. However, Nigeria neglected investment in human development projects and continued to pump borrowed finances into capital_intensive enterprises. The fallout was that the dramatic rise in national fortunes bypassed the majority of Nigerians, as evident from the negligible rise in per capita consumption figures for the same period.
The differential effect on poverty levels in rural and urban areas for the coinciding period is equally startling. Because of a simultaneous worsening of income distribution, rural poverty declined slightly while the number of urban poor gained. However, the worst_off were also the worst losers, as the population living in extreme poverty across Nigeria swelled up from 10 million to 14 million. The obvious explanation behind this is that policy makers sorely failed to share the increase in wealth equitably.
Till 1985, a variety of local factors (political turmoil and social unrest) and foreign influences (falling oil prices and mismanagement of state assets) was responsible for increasing poverty and a widening disparity between rural and urban incomes. Even by 1995, per capita income and consumption remained lower than at the beginning of the oil boom in the ’70s.
It was only towards the end of the 20th century that Nigeria began to press forward a concerted though gradual effort at reform and regulation, made possible by relative political stability and the establishment of a democratically elected government.
The advent of more inclusive policies truly began with the adoption of a proactive manifesto that sought to wean away Nigeria’s exclusive dependence on non_renewable resources and promote micro and macro level entrepreneurship as the only viable means to durable economic prosperity.
This change of stance pertinently describes the entrepreneurial spirit in general: the insistence on unique and creatively challenging business models for rapidly sustainable wealth creation. Entrepreneurship is the core ideal of all developed nations that have successfully capitalized on their human and natural resources to drive economic progress.
Since the Thatcher_Regan era of the 1980s, most developed and developing nations the world over have wholeheartedly embraced entrepreneurship as the key to economic and market superiority.
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/04/breaking-the-nigerian-poverty-cycle-through-entrepreneurial-revolution-part-1/