Imperative of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty

One of the high points in President Muhammadu Buhari’s Democracy Day speech was the announcement that over the next 10 years, the government would lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty. For every informed Nigerian, whether rich or poor, there can be no better news to cheer.

In 2018, Africa’s most populous nation was labelled the poverty capital of the world, which, as derogatory as it sounds, is simply what having 91 million people, and counting, living in extreme poverty amounts to.

We fully agree with and support the President’s intention to pull 100 million citizens out of absolute poverty over the next 10 years.

The number is tragic; it’s equivalent to the populations of Ghana, Côte d’ivoire and Niger Republic combined. The need is urgent; if nothing is done more than 100 million Nigerians will be living in poverty before 2029.

While the president’s intention – for this is what it is at the moment – should be applauded, it requires in addition to purposeful leadership, recognising that government cannot do it alone. It requires a clear understanding of the causes of this pervasive poverty level. One of the causes of poverty is lack of income, especially income generated from employment that people can depend on to meet their needs. And incomes are earned from jobs generated by businesses. Thus, above all, it requires a commitment to a private sector– led economic growth. As the past four years have shown a government-only approach through social investment programmes won’t work. Neither more debt nor the recovery of Abacha loot will do.

Lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty is thus a commitment to a private sector-led growth plan. A credible plan that translates the intention of the president into concrete goals that can life an average of 10 million Nigerians out of poverty every year for the next decade.

The urgency and capital required to achieve this goal calls for a mix of fiscal, monetary and industrial policies that can remove the bottlenecks in the economy and boost output of goods and services, and breathe life into comatose firms strewn around the country. It is these companies that will dent unemployment in the country which according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was 23 percent as at the end of the third quarter of 2018. This excludes the high rate of underemployment.

Nigeria can take a cue from two countries, China and India.

China, the most populous nation, has stunned the world with its antipoverty programme. In 1978, 90 percent of its population lived below the extreme poverty line; by 2014 99 percent of the population lived above that line. China has set a target of eliminating extreme poverty by 2020, and to achieve this, it set to lift 10 million people out of poverty each year from 2016. Between 2005 and 2016, India pulled 270 million of its people out of extreme poverty through a rapid increase of good and services produced to become a middle-income nation.