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NIGERIA
- Energizing mass economic growth for Poverty Reduction
By
Eugene Nzeribe, Executive
Director
ICAfrica
- International Charity for Africa, Canada
Sunday, March
16, 2008
www.icafrica.com
As
President Yar'dua takes office in Nigeria, I am suggesting
that poverty alleviation take the
number one place in our new government’s effort to develop
Nigeria. The other items on Yar’dua’s 7-point plan are
equally very important since they are supportive and
complementary. Once we start to seriously work towards poverty
reduction, income distribution in Nigeria will begin to
spread, the peak will begin to level off, even so slowly and
an appropriate middle-class will emerge (or re-emerge). The
question is how do we implement this poverty alleviation
program. I will come back to the answer later.
In
the meantime, I will underline the seriousness of our
circumstance by highlighting a brief background of the Africa
situation. (I have recently spent quite some time in the
research of poverty issues in Africa, prior to the launching
my charity – International Charity for Africa or ICAfrica).
We know that the international community claims to have spent
$600 billion, over the last 40 years, to help Africa
get out of poverty. (current expenditure is around $25 billion
per year). We also know that between 1980 to 2005 (United
Nations report) the number
of people living below the poverty line of $1/day in Africa,
rose from 200 to 400 million. According to the latest UN
report, there are 300 million unemployed able-bodied men and
women who are completely isolated from economic activities and
are therefore not contributing their economic potentials. This
situation is even worse in the case of Nigeria for, according
to CIDA Canada, only 10% of Nigerians are living above $2 a
day of income (Country Profile).
Nigeria
is the most populous country in Africa – with the greatest
number of poor. Therefore all those planning for a better
Africa, now recognize that progress towards a continent-wide
Millennium Development Goals hinges, to a great extent, on
Nigeria; especially on our ability to seriously begin to work
towards basic development objectives, as highlighted in Feb
2008, by President Yar’dua, in support of the 2020 vision.
In
Africa today, there are 55 countries in total but one in every
5 persons on that continent is a Nigerian. This underlines the
significance of Nigeria in helping to lead Africa onto the
road to sustained economic development and towards the
elimination of extreme poverty. As enlightened Nigerians you
must have wondered why the issues of extreme poverty still
remain despite several years of effort and billon of dollars
in spending by both the Nigerian government and the
international community. For sure, all that money did not buy
a better life for the majority of Nigerians and Africans.
Things got worse in some areas, as I mentioned earlier. Even
though proportionately, only very little international donor
money went to Nigeria (we were considered oil-rich and the
government of Nigeria was expected to fund most of her
development efforts), human capacity utilization in Nigeria
and most of sub-Sahara, dropped from near 50% to below 30%
(for various reasons that deserves a separate discussion).
This failure to grow the African economy could be attributed
to lack of understanding of local requirements by the advanced
country ODA programs, poor management of development issues by
many of the African governments and the failure of both sides
to articulate and implement the correct tools for tackling
extreme poverty on the continent at the micro level.
Back
to the current crossroad at which we, Nigerians, find
ourselves today and to answer the question of how to
realistically begin to solve the acute poverty problem of the
majority of Nigerians. Giving away $700US to 12,000 families
as President Yar’ dua has proposed will be just one
of the paraphernalia in his toolbox for kick-starting the just
about dormant economy. He can probably reach random family
heads by drawing a lottery, using the latest census data. This
will produce a huge psychological win for the government and
bring a much-desired goodwill, as Nigerians will see this as a
fair distribution of the national cake. But this is only a
start, which must be followed up immediately with a plan to
energize mass economic growth. As we have seen in the cases of
China and India, it is the diversified grassroots economic
development that enhances the growth of the middle-class,
drives away poverty and establishes sustained development.
There
is a popular Chinese proverb that says, "give a man fish
and you have fed him for a day but teach a man to fish and you
have fed him for life". To combat poverty and win, the
government of Nigeria must harness the potential energy of the
hundreds of thousands of promising small and micro
entrepreneurs throughout Nigeria and put them to work to begin
to grow the entire economy from all corners of the country, at
the micro level. The idea is that these entrepreneurs will
grow their ventures, become the little “engines” that
drive their local economies, add real value to the national
wealth and begin to create jobs for the other 60% of Nigerians
who are not fully employed or totally jobless.
What
will be required to pull this off (within the usual planning
rigmarole) are:
(1) a massive project of small & micro
business coaching for
entrepreneurs, including products, services & market
development and
(2)
easy access to micro-credits or revolving
loans for entrepreneurs through suitable outlets.
These
could pose a challenge of finding coaches, suitable
micro-lending outlets and organizing the entrepreneurs. But
like every successful venture, you start somewhere with a good
plan and build on it. The coaching services could begin from
the academia, at our various universities and colleges. NGOs
like ICAfrica could help with projects
development and supplying of appropriately experienced local
and international experts and volunteers. The Nigerian
government probably has enough fund with which to kick-start
this phase. The international community may be willing to come
on board with additional funding, not only when they see that
Nigeria is serious but also for the impact it will have on the
entire continent.
I have first hand knowledge of the
difficulties faced by entrepreneurs in Nigeria who are trying
to create work for themselves and for others from practically
nothing. From the brief experiments carried out by my charity,
we have found out is that an average of $400 invested in an
appropriate venture usually results in a new fulltime job
within 12 months and for each person that has a fulltime job,
an average of 3 people moves off the poverty line. This goes
to prove that it takes very little to make an impact in the
lives of people in Nigeria.
The
new government of Nigeria should be commended and encouraged
not to be distracted from this effort. At first, it may appear
a Herculean task but then Nigeria has experts within the
country and in Diaspora, and just like in China and India,
would wake-up the pent-up energy and the enterprising sprit of
the citizens. There is no question that the people of Nigeria
will help push the train up the hill, with the beckoning of a
capable driver. Lets encourage “comrade” Yar’dua, to
champion this cause. It is about time.
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Eugene
Nzeribe, Executive Director
ICAfrica - International Charity for Africa
P.O. Box 26012
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA K2H 9R6
email: eugene_nzeribe@icafrica.com
website: www.icafrica.com
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