Nigeria is currently faced with perhaps, the worst hunger crisis in decades. Nearly half of the country’s over 230 million population is unable to feed adequately and these are persons living below the international poverty line defined by the United Nations as $1.9 per day. With food inflation up by 39.16% in October 2024, higher than the previous year’s 31.52%, a significant 7.64% growth, and consumer purchasing power down year–on–year, the prospect of eradicating hunger and poverty in Nigeria seems bleak in the foreseeable immediate and long term.
Nigeria has for several years been caught in an unending poverty conundrum with an economy that is largely dependent on crude oil revenues and an over-bloated government system, both at national and sub-national levels, not to talk about the needless and endless corruption amongst the elite political class. Nigeria represents a practical case for a country determined to fail in all parameters of economic growth.
Nigeria’s stunted development is not caused by natural disasters, a lack of resources, both human and material, or a lack of capable manpower to grow the economy. Rather, Nigeria’s failure to emerge as an economic powerhouse within Africa or in the world has been largely and fundamentally due to bad government policies deliberately designed to enrich a few, a largely corrupt political system resulting in fraudulent elections, poor planning coupled with policies inconsistencies and a lack of effective policy implementation framework assisted by strong institutional lockjam.
The recently concluded G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, had set three clear agenda as priorities for the G20 dialogue in 2024 and these are social inclusion and the fight against hunger, energy transition, and sustainable development in its social, economic, and environmental aspects and reform of the global governance institutions. A significant outcome of the G20 summit was the launch of the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty.
The Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty is positioned to catalyze the achievement of the two key Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 1-2) which are to end extreme poverty worldwide and to end hunger, achieve food security, promote nutrition, and achieve sustainable agriculture. These two goals of the SGD are the most germane of the total 17 Goals enshrined in the global agenda for development whose lifespan is 2030. With less than six years to the fruition of the SDGs, experts have advocated for the acceleration of investments in time and resources toward the actualization of important goals such as these two – Ending Poverty and Hunger.
With a growing cry across Nigeria and a series of protests to highlight the worsening incidences of hunger, it brings to the fore the need for the government to pay critical attention to this twin issue of growing mass Hunger and Poverty in Nigeria.
At the G20 Summit, the Nigerian government did signal a commitment to the Global Alliance against poverty and hunger with a promise by the President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to abide by the core demands of the global pact. However, one is in doubt whether this promise will be kept. Since coming into office, the president has embarked on several social investments and poverty reduction programs with the commitment to reverse the rising incidences of poverty, but not much has been achieved and none of the various initiatives has worked convincingly.
Following the previous administration under former president Muhammadu Buhari, with the conditional cash transfer and the Government Empowerment programs under the framework of the National Social Investment Programmes (NISP), these poverty alleviation policies scored very low on all indicators in terms of the set goals, with Nigeria’s poverty number jumping to a record 133 million people in multidimensional poverty by 2023 when the Buhari administration handed over to the current administration.
It is on record that the NSIP program failed to achieve the set goals of lowering the poverty numbers; rather it became a cesspool of intensive and stinking corruption with much of the money earmarked for conditional cash transfer gone to individuals without any verifiable identities and addresses, no data or proven records of disbursement of cash and palliatives. The school feeding program was not left out of numerous scandals and millions of children were claimed to have been fed while schools were on lockdown due to COVID-19.
The current administration did initiate several programs targeted at reducing poverty, some called palliatives aimed at reducing the painful impact of the removal of fuel subsidies. However, many citizens have yet to feel any impact of the ‘palliatives’ and with a significant number of citizens falling into poverty by the day, it begs the question of whether a Poverty and Hunger-free Nigeria is still possible.
Several fruitless efforts have been made by various administrations over the past six decades and even as recently within the current democratic dispensation, which started in 1999, to mitigate and reduce poverty prevalence in Nigeria. Some of the landmark and highly promoted programs to address poverty have achieved no significant success to date rather poverty and hunger have become more endemic, threatening families and contributing to both insecurity and other development challenges facing Nigeria.
It is, therefore, hoped that this current administration under President Bola Tinubu will not, as the case with previous administrations, merely mouth a determination to tackle poverty and hunger without taking concrete steps and learning useful examples from other countries such as Brazil, China, and India on how to address poverty headlong within a large and growing population.
Dr. Ikem is a public policy communication expert. He holds a PhD in development communication and his thesis focused on communication channels as predictors of knowledge and participation in governments’ poverty alleviation policies.
