Eradicating poverty in Nigeria

POVERTY simply means lack of basic needs of life. These are food, clothing and shelter. Poverty is more than the above meaning but these are the basics. The world poverty clock data are updated to take into account new household surveys and new projections on country economic growth from the International Monetary Funds’ World Economic Outlook.

This forms the basic building blocks for poverty trajectories computed for 188 countries and territories, developed and developing, across the world. From the findings, Nigeria has the largest number of extremely poor people in early 2018. By the report, “extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute”.

More than 85 million Nigerians live in abject poverty. Already Africans account for about two thirds of the world’s extreme poor. If current trends persist, they will account for nine tenths by 2030. Fourteen out of 18 countries in the world where the number of extreme poor is rising are in Africa.

It seems we don’t have solution to our problem because the way the economy was structured and instituted has brought an embargo and constraints to possible solution that could have been established. This is one major problem that decision makers are also battling with but they have failed to voice out on it.

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Nigeria is one of the fastest growing populations in the world but our economy fails to grow in corresponding rate with the population of the country. The economy is contracting because investors have no incentive to invest in the domestic economy which could have facilitated the growth needed in the economy but the populace needs to depend on government to create jobs which is the major cause of unemployment in the country. Investors lack the confidence to invest as the government has failed to create the enabling environment that could have created the confidence.

Lack of jobs created by the private sector had propelled the government of Nigeria to employ more workers but still unemployment in the economy is very high as 40 per cent and thousands of people are losing their jobs yearly. Government’s failure to pay salaries had great effects on the economy as the government is the largest employer of workers in the country.

Poverty will keep increasing until citizens are ready to reduce the family size holding.

In Nigeria we are getting poorer because we lack resources to meet our needs. As family size increases, expenditure rises beyond the available resources could meet the needs of the family. Examining critically the present situation of the country, the cost of raising a child from birth to university level has increased. Real wages have fallen, bargaining power due to high unemployment rate is extremely low leading to low income earning and a corresponding high cost of living in Nigeria because the degree of openness of the economy is high.

We give birth to as many children as we intend and we can’t cope with this stringent economic condition. That is why we remain poor and poverty keep increasing in our country.

• Ayeni Emmanuel,

emmanuelayodeji63@yahoo.com