Social Welfare Schemes cannot lift 133 million Nigerians out of poverty

This is not the first time we have heard of such a bold yet impractical goal statement. The former Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar Farouq, said the same thing in 2022.

In March 2023, she declared that 1,940,004 vulnerable Nigerians were, at the time, receiving N5,000 cash gifts each every month. A sum she believed was lifting them out of poverty. One can only find this simultaneously laughable and lamentable.

The new minister, Edu needs to understand — if she hasn’t already — that social welfare schemes alone have not and cannot eradicate poverty, and neither can policies focusing only on the income aspect of poverty in Nigeria or any country. Time and again, the Federal Government has intentionally misled the public with statements of lifting Nigerians out of poverty. It is a sick lie that should no longer be told. The hopes of Nigerians have already been dashed one time too many times.

Let’s not forget that in 2019, former President Muhammadu Buhari said he would lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years and he obviously couldn’t. Buhari later claimed that his administration had lifted at least 10.5 million people out of poverty in the country in two years, including farmers, small-scale traders, artisans, market women among others. This was later disproved by a World Poverty Clock report showing that more Nigerians slipped into poverty.

So, one can rightly ask what yardsticks the FG used to measure a person or family that has risen above the poverty line. How did they come about such data? There are no answers to these questions.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), any individual who spends less than N376.5 a day on food and other basic needs like shelter, clothing, health, education, electricity, and security (or sleep) is considered poor.

Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betta Edu. [Twitter:@Doc_steena] Pulse Nigeria

Thus, all the government does is peddle false information on this issue. Nigeria’s poverty rate increased under Buhari’s regime and has continued to do so. In fact, the subsidy removal has already increased the national poverty level. Social welfare initiatives by the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs are short-term and should only complement fundamental economic policies and a comprehensive set of well-coordinated measures.

Poverty reduction can largely be attained by stimulating economic growth to increase incomes and expand employment opportunities for the poor; undertaking economic and institutional reforms to enhance efficiency and improve the utilisation of resources; prioritising the basic needs of the poor in national development policies; promoting microfinance programmes for entrepreneurship, and small scale business and providing private sector incentives.

Moreover, poverty in Nigeria is not due to the dearth of resources, but mismanagement and misappropriation of resources. It is clear that this is a multifaceted problem with multifaceted solutions. The government must create an enabling environment for the private sector to thrive; employ more hands and deploy more products and services. More importantly, the government must prioritise the growth of SMEs.

Tinubu’s administration must also radically enhance power generation, transmission and distribution to channel more vigour into large and small-scale enterprises. Energy is vital for economic growth, as production is a function of capital, labour and energy. Energy is required to power industrial processes within an economy. It is counterproductive to give loans to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) without providing energy among other things.

Unfortunately, insufficient, unreliable or costly access to electricity has remained a choking restraint for SMEs in Nigeria. Over the past two decades, the limited growth of Nigeria’s electricity supply industry, combined with the high cost of diesel and fuel, has crippled the growth of the country’s productive and commercial industries.

The World Bank said SMEs are vital for poverty alleviation and job creation, employing 50 per cent of the working population and accounting for more than 90 per cent of all businesses worldwide. So, no matter the social welfare scheme put in place, sustainability is even more important. Nigeria must create the spaces for her people to thrive, not depend on such incomprehensive schemes.

In 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) posited that 133 million Nigerians are suffering from multidimensional poverty, with children constituting more than half of poor people in the country. This signifies that two out of every three Nigerians are poor and experience just over one-quarter of all possible deprivations in terms of health, education, living standards, and work and shocks.

The National Social Investment Programmes (NSIP) delivered through the N-Power, National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, Conditional Cash Transfer and the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme anchored on TraderMoni, MarketMoni and FarmerMoni were the government’s humanitarian and social interventions in Nigeria with ₦1 trillion spent or rather wasted.

All of those schemes were fraught with a lack of proper implementation, a lack of a verifiable and reliable social database, nepotism, and corruption. There is an alarming disconnect between the sums spent and the impact of these schemes.

I hold no grievance against Dr Edu, but I have zilch expectations from her as the captain steering the wheel of the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs. After all, the ministry, under the leadership of her predecessor, Sadiya Umar Farouq, was embroiled in corruption scandals.

It is highly likely that this administration will simply rebrand prior schemes under new names. However, if she truly wants to create long-term sustainable and impactful schemes to alleviate the suffering of Nigerians, she must review those schemes and go beyond surficial social welfare schemes.

Abiodun Salako, a Freelance Journalist and Editorial Assistant at UK-based Divinations Mag, writes from Lagos. Say cheerio to him on Twitter @iam_seawater.