The poverty war in Nigeria (2) By Dr. UZODINMA ADIRIEJE (Email: uaadirieje@hotmail.com) Sun Newspaper, Tuesday, October 26, 2004 Various stakeholders in the Nigerian project are waging the poverty war from several fronts. While some continue to use their positions, influence, deceit, power and or coercion and do everything within their power and means to ensure that the poverty levels for the majority remain at their present state and or even worsen - at great personal gains for them and their families, others strive to point to directions that would practically put more food, clothes and shelter at the disposal of the majority of our masses - at great personal risks for them and their families. In their effort to pursue various social and economic policies within their chosen fronts, little or no sincere and effective attention had been paid to the need to gain an understanding of the distributional impact of the economic policies and programmes undertaken under the auspices of these poverty induction or reduction strategies. While we have been bombarded with various socioeconomic regimes for more than 20 years now since His Excellency, President Shehu Shagari introduced austerity measures in the early 80s, available evidence suggests that governments, policy makers and key stakeholders are placing an increasing emphasis on spending less money on projects that are of direct benefit to the majority of the citizens, and policies that make them poorer daily, even as we are endlessly told that these policies are aimed at enhancing participation of a variety of stakeholders, and that good practice would continue to emerge in the areas of transparency, monitoring and evaluation, in the implementation of national budgets. As the implementation of these policies continues, opportunities to critically and sincerely review their impact on the various segments of our society have hardly been created and or utilized. Contrary views expressed on this poverty war, are seen as either unpatriotic or outright betrayal, and treated as such with dispatch. The country’s ranking on the human development indicator (HDI) - which measures average national achievements in long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living, nosedived to an all-time low of 152 among 175 countries of the world in year 2003. Standard of living has steadily deteriorated; even in families with very few children and hardworking parents. Retirees, who were not able to pile up wealth by all means while in service, and who have been lucky to remain alive, have also remained very poor since the advent of the various socio-economic policies of the early 80s, and their situations remain unabated. In order to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) which is to halve the number of people living in such poverty by 2015, we must now adopt and frankly pursue policy options for addressing health, economic, social, educational and infrastructural inequalities. Such policy options include increasing our current budgetary allocation and investments in education, promotion of rural development, maintaining existing urban infrastructure – roads, water and electricity, increasing the availability and quality of health and social services, implementing health-financing alternatives, empowering the citizens through commensurate earnings, and developing poverty-oriented socioeconomic goals by which to measure progress. This would also include strategies for ensuring that employment is accorded higher priority in national and international socio-
economic efforts, while policies that enthrone social inequalities like unequal pay for the same work among the various ethnic groups or states within the country, must be dispensed with. It is also important that we understand who the poor are and how social, economic and environmental conditions differ in our various ethnic groups/states, to enable us to monitor and evaluate the impact of efforts to alleviate poverty; and avoid situations where those who are known to be well-to-do in their various communities, end up being the direct beneficiaries of poverty alleviation programmes; even in situations where more than half of the population is presently living on less than $1 a day, and health and social services continue to be out of the reach of the majority. Suffice it to say that this would also enable us to integrate the MDGs into the existing poverty war, while initiating and implementing processes in the regions or states towards the eradication or reduction of poverty and destitution, using more effective strategies and alliances. One of our ‘current concerns’ is that the classification of Nigeria as one of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) – a pretentious post-structural adjustment programmes World Bank and the International Monetary Fund initiative, designed to "reduce" the high external debt of some of the world’s poorest nations, is improper. Improper because despite all the earnings of this country since the advent of both SAP and HIPC, the economies of many countries around the world have continued to be swelled and sustained with the resources of Nigeria, accruing from vast oil earnings since the same period and even to the present day, and which have been illegally and massively siphoned out of the country by members of the same group that use their positions, influence, deceit, power and or coercion and do everything within their powers and means to ensure that the poverty levels for the majority remain at their present state and or even worsen. The irony is, that these institutions, which are daily bombarding us with SAP and HIPC, are aware of this scenario, have the capacity to stop it, but have chosen to ‘siddon-look’. At a time like this, the country would benefit from an open and informed cross-ethnic dialogue on the subject of our unabetting poverty regime. Such dialogue sessions should bring together a wide range of stakeholders including particular policymakers, politicians, businesspersons, market women (including the very illiterate ones), interpreters, representatives of multilateral organizations, bilateral donors, civil society organizations, students, the academia, etc., in a bottom-up approach, and not an up-bottom approach. The purpose of such a dialogue would be to review and exchange experiences towards the preparation of capacity-sensitive poverty reduction strategies, indicators, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. One reason the recently-launched NEEDS (national economic and empowerment development strategy) has so far failed to enjoy the support of Nigerians beyond what government-people say about it, is because even though (and this is rather unfortunate) it is world bank /IMF inclined, it failed to utilise the bottom-up approach, and rather relied on the obsolete up-bottom approach, where an already prepared and publicized document was thrown on our people, and presented before an some invited guests who ‘adopted and applauded’ it, and went home to continue to face their real problems of poverty, deprivation and destitution, in a country that is literally flowing with milk and honey. Finally, it must be noted that genuine dialogue enhances participation, and remains key to poverty reduction and development. It improves the success rate and sustainability of programmes and policies, and produces better designs to meet local needs. The 'one-size-
fits all' and 'cut and paste’ policies from the World Bank or IMF, which fail to address the social costs of adjustment have proven unsustainable. Policies that would enhance growth must be pro-poor, because growth is no growth unless it reaches the poor. May it be so with our beloved country, Nigeria?