President Tinubu’s charge to governors on anti-poverty war

Elimination of poverty is the ultimate purpose of government policies and actions. Yet its prevalence shows that many governments perform so poorly at it. Poverty remains the biggest challenge to authorities because there is a clear divide between the poor and the rich.

This explains the combustible nature of national statistics on poverty in most countries. To prove that they are doing well and that their policies are improving citizens’ standards, governments are generally inclined to produce figures that tell good stories about their anti-poverty programmes.

President Bola Tinubu reflected on this phenomenon at his meeting with state governors on Monday in Abuja. Speaking against the background of the convergence of Ramadan and Lent, he urged the governors to mainstream poverty eradication in their programmes at the grassroots.

The truth is that poverty has a cause. But it also has a solution. It is politics that creates poverty. It is economics – good economics, working through credible policies– that addresses the challenge of poverty. The best approach to eliminating poverty is to design appropriate economic policies and ensure that they are implemented faithfully.

The existence of poverty indicates misallocation of resources or failure to allocate resources optimally. Here, we can adopt the two types of poverty identified by Yuval Noah Harari in his epochal book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Hariri declares that poverty is of two types: social poverty, which, according to him, withholds from some people the opportunities available to others; and biological poverty, which puts the lives of individuals at risk due to lack of food and shelter.

The first type is a given state and derives from asset ownership. Economists have identified the lack of access to assets as a contributing factor to poverty. Research into poverty has ascertained that without access to assets, individuals face stiff challenges in life. If this is coupled with joblessness or lack of education, then absolute poverty becomes almost inevitable.

Policies that address this type of poverty include social and economic reforms that encourage education that allows social mobility. It also calls for policies that eliminate anti-competitive forces in society, thereby creating the famous ‘level-playing field’ that allows equal opportunities to children from both poor and rich backgrounds.

Harari says that social poverty may never be eradicated, while in many parts of the world, biological poverty has become “a thing of the past.”

This contrasts with Nigeria’s experience. Biological poverty is still prevalent, just as its social counterpart is evident. This supports the claim I made earlier that poverty is created. Its persistence shows that somewhere, some resources have not been fully deployed to produce the expected outcome for the benefit of citizens.

Poverty becomes intractable when efforts to halt its spread fail to keep pace with its propagation speed. This happens for many reasons, chief among which is the application of inappropriate policies. Biological poverty, for instance, requires empowerment so that the poor can become productive, able to generate income and put food on the table, in the absence of sustainable social safety nets.

The trouble with poverty in Nigeria today, as in some other countries, is that too many factors are contributing to its multiplication, which is why the number of the poor in the country keeps swelling. Economic policies, rooted in ongoing reforms, are part of the causal factors driving poverty because of the social and economic dislocations they engender. However, when the reforms succeed, a new social and economic order could offer better opportunities. Structural rigidities that underlie our economy and society also add to the problem.  Many vulnerable citizens are excluded from the mainstream of the economy, being mere peripheral players.

There is also the security challenge that restricts people’s full participation in the economic activities across the board. Many citizens have been dislocated from the economy due to banditry.

On this point, President Tinubu struck a striking note. He told the governors that the solution to poverty should be “all-encompassing so that we can spread the development opportunity across to the grassroots and local governments.” This is the ideal approach to poverty alleviation (better still, eradication), so that citizens, no matter their party affiliations and locations, can benefit from socioeconomic measures implemented by governments.

However, politics does sometimes get in the way. Political considerations become determinants of who benefits from policies to address poverty. Sometimes this may not be intentional, but political structures have the capacity to pervert or hijack programmes, and in the process. Perhaps President Tinubu’s message signals a new approach to the fight against poverty.

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