One of the greatest scandals of the 21st century is that sub-Saharan Africa remains synonymous with poverty and other debilitating developmental issues that continue to plague the developing world. Indeed,so steeped is sub-Saharan Africa in crippling poverty and underdevelopment that that part of the African continent which for long has attracted sympathetic glances from the rest of the developing world continues to routinely post some truly shocking statistics.
A flailing giant on a failing continent
For Nigeria,the self-styled ‘giant of Africa’s the failures that are at once national and international, prominently feature in the familiar story of a promise horribly and cruelly aborted.
It may have taken a moment of colonial madness for Lord Lugard to band together two diametrically opposed regions to form a country in 1914, but it was not a madness milked of all method as he had acted presumably in the interest of the British colonial rule.
If their country was the product of an odious orchestration from the beginning, it behooved on Nigerians to make something out of the very little that was foisted on them especially after the colonialists left in 1960.
After independence in 1960,Nigerians could have been driven by national rage and patriotism to salvage what little was left of their country.
Instead, Nigeria was to bear witness to the horrible intrusions that the military coups of 1966 were,and the cataclysmic convolution that the 1967-70 civil war turned out to be.
Nigeria may have survived the civil war but only just, and since then,the country has lurched from one seemingly intractable challenge to another,many of them man-made.
The knots of grinding poverty
Historically and till this day,one of the most formidable challenges that has confronted and continues to confront Nigerians is crippling poverty.Too many Nigerians are too poor for comfort.
Nigeria’s population only recently hit 216 million. It was many months ago that the World Bank estimated and intimated that out of that number,about 91 million were dirt-poor, languishing hopelessly and helplessly beneath the international poverty line.
Now, only recently, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) about 133 million Nigerians representing about 63 per cent of the entire population are living in multidimensional poverty.
According to the Bureau,of the total number of poor Nigerians which is staggering by any standard,105.98 million are located in rural areas, while about 16.97 are located in urban areas.
A riot of rural poverty
Nigeria’s paucity of data is historic. However, by any measure, these figures are frightening especially as they show how disproportionately poverty is scything into rural Nigerians.
The damage poverty does to life and the quality of life not just of individuals but of families across entire generations is well documented.
Poverty especially crashes into children, taking apart their dreams and prospects layer by layer.
Long abandoned to the caprices of poverty, the fairly recent spate of insecurity that is convulsing rural areas has only contributed to the deepening poverty affecting those who live in those areas.
For this group of Nigerians, their experience of Nigeria with its unique and toxic mix of poverty and insecurity is a deeply traumatizing one.
For Nigerians especially rural Nigerians to escape the destabilizing tentacles of poverty, changes that can empower the poorest Nigerians to come out of crushing poverty have to be rung on the deepest levels.
But whether those who should at least kick start these changes are ready to do so is a question for another day.
Kene Obiezu,
Twitter: @kenobiezu
