Trading Against Poverty

By

Nduka Uzuakpundu

In setting global development agenda - via the recently agreed upon universal Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - the United Nations did so in the conscious realisation of just how crucial a role the media would be expected to play. The announcement of the Millennium Development Declaration, in 2000, was equally at an historical juncture - between the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. And, in 2005, when Mr Kofi Annan - the Secretary-General of the U.N. - spelt out, in detail, the MDGs, and what was expected of member-states of the world body, it was clear that the media would, in the next decade - up to 2015 - be playing the part of an agent of change. The MDGs - basically designed to ameliorate, if not eradicate, the untoward effects of poverty - are, to a very large extent, tied, inexorably, to the performance of member-states of the U.N. at the level of macro-economics, international trade as practised on the basis of fairness and openness - in keeping with rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO); and - in order to aid the crucial role of the media - how much of good governance: democracy, transparency and untrammelled access to information; is practiced by the state. While there is already an over-dose of cheerless news about the prospects of the WTO in meeting the challenges of development, as predicated on the gains of international commerce, there appears an unconscious restriction of the media from taking a visible part in an issue that is right there on its amorphous, but recognised, turf: governments would rather negotiate amongst themselves on how to arrive at a manageable degree of open trade, where, for instance, the countries of the industrialised North would, rather, for political reason, not open their market, generously, for imparts coming from the less industrialised countries of the South. And, in order to always secure votes of the organised private sector (OPS), which is dominated by conglomerates and multia-nationals, most governments of the industrialised North - as in the European Union and the Americas - pump in generous industrial and, agricultural subsidies into the hands of local manufacturers so as to make imported goods less competitive. To the extent that this imbalance is consciously fanned by the governments of the industrialised North, so as to augment their advantage in international trade, it poses a challenge - some writes have argued that it’s an unjust practice that would make unrealistic the fine objectives of poverty eradication and sustainable human development desired in the MDGs - to governments and policy-makers, who may have to take the media along in a journey in search of a fairly level playing ground. There is a lot more to free trade and insincere policy statement of not siding with protectionist tendencies. For most countries of the South, the first step to take is making trade and development-related intelligence available to the media. Not only would that help the media to understand what’s being done to meet voter’s and tax - payer’s expectations as per the MDGs, what challenge government is facing on the issue of poverty eradication - and what assistance the media could render. Surely, government, in a modern state, cannot arrogate to itself the repository of flawless wisdom; its countenance of the media as an ally - an ally that is ready to give kudos and knocks when they are well deserving - could make the challenge of poverty eradication, as the very basis of sustainable human development, less cumbrous.

The prospect is more imperative in countries of the South - even in China, India, South Africa, Nigeria and Brazil, which are some measured stars of poverty reduction and sustainable human development: Nigeria, because of her historical, if unexpected, record of erasing her foreign debt. Mr Nosa Osazuwa, who heads the United Nations Information Center, in Lagos, pointed out, at a recent workshop on “Media, Information Access and Governance Programme”, organised by the World Bank Institute and Agenda Institute and Media Rights Agenda - a Lagos-based non-governmental organisation - that “Nigeria is a country richly endowed in human and natural resources, which still has a lot to do on poverty reduction, despite the recent public declaration that the country is experiencing substantial growth in the economy. No fewer than 60 percent of the people still subsist below the official poverty line: many households do not earn enough income to meet their basic human needs.” This observation, which is, ringingly, true, does, to a certain degree, absolve those who have made the playing field of international trade far from level for the country as conspirators for the country’s development crisis. Rather, it’s an indictment on poor leadership and the corrupt stratocracy that piloted the affairs of the state, especially between 1984 and 1998. For Nigeria, the next decade would be quite crucial, as she goes about poverty eradication, now that she is no longer indebted to foreign creditors, but richly-blessed with a fat foreign reserve.

And yet, there is an informed fear of whether the spirit of openness behind the campaign against corruption and poverty eradication programmes of the Obasanjo administration would be sustained by its successor. Thus, media right to monitor how the unusually fat content of the foreign serve is put to public use - for the benefit of all: prudent re-investment to grow income, aggregate consumption and providing the citizenry with the needed opportunities and choices to exercise their full rights to employment, health, education, shelter, security, and to ensure a decent and sustainable livelihood - would be well-tested. At the macro-economic level, it may interest the media, to keep a tab on how government employs, again, the unusually fat foreign reserve in offering appropriate production and industrialization strategies to encourage productive agents to take active part in competitive production and to deliver at competitive market prices. Attention should also be paid to export penetrating strategy, like free-trade zones, beginning with the West African sub-region, and, progressively, to the African Union - with preferential platforms for firms engaged in export business. With good labour and business laws, steeled by solid banking system, foreign investments would as a sign of international confidence, flow in. Even though the international trading arena is far from tidy as the less developed countries (LDCs) of the South would expect, renascent democracies, therein, ought to invest, no less, in political stability and internal security backed by effective policing, in that “they help, greatly, to assure foreign investors about the safety of their investment and the business environment.”