Poverty in Wealth: The Nigerian Emblem

By

Muhammed Ibrahim Adamkolo

adamkolo76@yahoo.com

…shall it be wisdom or smartness  of man

that there exists quantum surplus and obscene

opulence for a few, side-by-side with total lack

 or unspeakable poverty for the majority,

who strike, claw and bicker at one another

for the pleasure of that few....Marius Nyoyergo

                                                In Africa is sinking

Poverty is a wild fire that dreads no chemical extinguisher nor fears the fire fighter’s hose water but rather like the ember of rancour being fanned continues to voraciously consume whatever lies in its way. In this country poverty has every right to stay, propagate and conquer the helpless masses. Like the most dreaded man-killer disease of the present era-AIDS-as purportedly claimed by many poverty in  Nigeria is deliberately cultured, I mean incubated in the Nigerian laboratory of he who posses power shall usurp and siphon every naira dollar or pound that the power should vigilantly guard into his private bank accounts.

In other words, the horrifying picture of down-ward slide in the economic well-being of the citizenry as depicting a whole 87 per cent of the population or about 93 million of the estimated 120 million people living in abject poverty as at 1996. but strangely, this development has come of an avoidable slide which started much earlier in the life of the independent state in 1960s. in 1964, over 84 per cent of the population was living above poverty line. But poverty level jumped from 28.1 per cent in 1980 to 46.3 per cent in 1965. in 1996, it had got to 65.5 per cent or 67.1 million of the population. These, each in its final analysis gets proper definition in the reduction of the person to the margin below the so-called ‘poverty line’, w hich on its own, is defined as the “marginal income line at which an adequate living standard is (not) possible”. Perhaps the journalist governorChimaroke Nnamani of Enugu State in his ‘Poverty in Surplus’, who  pictures poverty that way could have had a vision, or just an inspiration that poverty in Nigeria like the very oxygen we breath in order to survive cannot be got rid of where he wrote  that statement. Yet the most flabbergasting aspect of it all is where he philosophies”… water, water, every where; little to drink”. What meanings this philosophical and chantable terse statement embodies? I believe, it means a lot. In fact the volume of what this philosophy encompasses can drain off any pen flowing with ink if it had to be detailed in dry letters on parchment. The phenomenon manifests in the bitter feelings of those who see themselves as needlessly getting into excessive activities to eke out a living from hand to mouth.

Nigerians are actually living poor, impoverished and diseased in abundance.  The wealth is there in its abundance yet like the saline ocean water which is so abundant that it circles the world cannot be drunk. This is a perfect irony of the sheer abuse of power and misuse of polity. In my community I have neighbours who cried when I cried and laughed when I laughed; who washed ten and dipped five in the bowls of “manner and quails” only twice a day on average like I do. But since I and members of my family voted them into office we no longer can see them as half often as we used to shortly after they sat in the seat of leadership. They were voted into office. They now live in mansions- residences and palaces roofed with “jinin talaka” (the blood of the poor) roofing sheets, blowing us dust as they drive by us in their bullet-proof and tinted-glassed multi-million naira cars and jeeps. The only favour I now am very much proud of obtaining from them is the toot of the horn of their car that they deafen my ears with any time they pass by me signifying the usual Muslim greeting ‘assalamu alaikum’. This kind of episode is ubiquitous in this country. Our leaders who were once living amidst us experiencing the same bitter taste of life with us will be the ones to create artificial poverty and inflict us with after they had ceremoniously collected our mandates and promised by swearing with the Quran or the Bible to lead with fairness and justice. It would be a miraculous feat if the Nigerian leader does not lick what he vomited and swept under the carpet what he was entrusted with to hold firmly in the right hand. Then, therefore I see no reason why would the Nigerian leader com e out every May Day or National Day to blow promises that he would fight or eradicate poverty. After all it is the Nigerian leaders who like the United States government did to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladeen, armed the poverty to teeth with every sophisticated weapon and trained it in the best way they can to fight the Nigerian masses and subdue them so that they the (plundering) leaders can have their day.

Well, as for the case of the United States with Saddam Hussein and Bin Ladeen we have seen what happened. Despite all the White House receptions and treatment the U.S. government rendered the duo they at long last had succeeded in entering into the nose of the US government which has now succeeded in (unjustly) getting hold of Saddam it however, finds it difficult, extremely difficult to blow out bin Ladeen from its nose. Similarly, the Nigerian government with all the power prowess and pomp it possesses is finding it onerous to only alleviate let alone eradicate poverty. The Arabs say “Samin Kalbaka ya ‘kuluk”, meaning (if) you fatten your dog, it will bite you. The Nigerian government has fattened its dog-poverty-thinking that it will bark at and threaten the masses only. But bravo! The dog has grown horns and fears neither poverty alleviation programme nor poverty eradication whatever. However, it is the helpless poor who are being ruthlessly tossed between the apparent aroma of the hollow promises of the leaders and the venomous yawns of hunger and poverty. This is in Nigeria, in Africa.

However, for states in the western world, the configuration of poverty and the attendant tackle given it marked out clear visions of which it was largely appreciated as moving their world forward, in earnest. This included state injunctions and refrains of social forces depicting poverty as creations of man in unbridled search for higher material elevation and supremacy. Even in the eastern civilization of the old Babylon, Hummurabi was the first even to decree against poverty in his ‘imperious stele” issued over 6000 years ago. He decreed that “Justice can only be done if the poor is no longer allowed to be poor, because, the poor and weak are poor and defenseless because the rich and strong have refused justice to the orphan and widow”.

Even a more 190 years ago, Jonathan Swift an Anglo-Irish writer wrote in his sweeping political satire “Modest Proposal” admonished the world in his shocking suggestion that since there appeared no interest among the rich and powerful to seek a solution to the high percentage of the country women and children thronging the squares as beggars, a policy should be made for “Irish children born to poor families … be put to good use as meat and leather to be sold to the wealthy” who snubbed the downtrodden and moved on with their bounteous life. Of course we have come a long way, since these days, especially in our world where issues joined since Magna Carter have produced state and group attention to at least understanding poverty.

The Nigeria government has lesson to learn from the Hummurabi and Swift’s saga city. Let everything humanly possible be done to see that poverty is eradicated, or at least alleviated to the barest minimum (I’m not referring to the moribund NAPEP). Swift had satirically preferred that Irish children be sold to the wealthy (political elites) as an alternative means of eking a living little had he thought that a time would come when in African  country called Nigeria people would be pushed to the wall of poverty by their leaders to the extent that they (masses) resorting to selling their sons and daughters in a phenomenon that would be known as child kidnapping and human trafficking.

A current analysis of the 1996 American Bureau of census reports suggest that of the 15 per cent or about 34 million of the citizens who, by waves of immigration, were understandably poor, it would be prosperous to put them side by side with the over 65 per cent or 67..1 million below-baseline poor Nigerians, recorded within the same zone. And further to that, neither the 10.15 per cent poor in Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, could be equaled to our own middle-to-middle class, nor the 5.8 per cent poor in Belgium, Germany, France and Italy be represented as our upstart  working but sufficient class.

P.M.B. 1069, Maiduguri,

Borno State.