BETWEEN REALITY AND FICTION ... WHICH WAY OKONJOS NIGERIA? Nigeria remains a country of paradoxes. It’s not just Africa’s largest oil producer which also imports refined oil products, it is also Africa’s largest economy with the highest incidence of poverty. Just as the country was busy trying to rebase its GDP, news came from the World Bank that Nigeria is one of the countries with the highest number of desperately poor people in the world. While Nigeria has the highest number of private jet owners on the African continent – at the last count they were more than 200 – the same Nigeria has the largest number of desperately poor people in Africa and one of the largest in the world. Of the 174 million people in Nigeria, 122 million people live in desperate poverty, using the acceptable extreme poverty line of $1.25 a day. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s finance minister, quickly responded to the World Bank’s report by saying that it was a matter of Nigeria’s population especially as China and India, the world’s most populated countries, were also on the World Bank’s list. Okonjo-Iweala obviously found sop in the fact that China and India were on the list. She was extremely happy about that. But, like almost everything about the Jonathan government, she was telling only half the truth. Yes, large population must have contributed to Nigeria being included by the World Bank on that infamous list; what Okonjo-Iweala did not say is that while China has steadily lifted nearly 700 million people out of poverty in the last 20 years, Nigeria has added 105 million new desperately poor people during the corresponding period. And while India has lifted 138 million people out of poverty in the last seven years alone, Nigeria has added nearly 50 million people to the list of extremely poor people during the corresponding period, most of them coming with the Jonathan presidency. And this should surprise no one: Poverty in a nation has a linear relationship with the rate of looting that leaders afflict on their countries. According to the official figures, there are more than 122 million desperately poor people in Nigeria at the moment. In 1981, the figure was 17.1 million poor people and, in 2004, it was 68.7 million. So is Nigeria a rich country of poor men or a poor country of rich men? We can argue this forever. But Nigeria will continue to defy logic until the right people take over the helm. And one thing is sure: if with all the looting we currently see, where $20 billion can just get missing without a trace, Nigeria is still standing and growing, then, with proper people in charge, Nigeria will start competing with the biggest and the best in the world .... Uncle Sam Ndah Isaiah.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 06:35:42 +0000
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