Abstract:
With
the end of the military rule and the emergence of democratic governance
with its mantra of speedy development
for the Nigerian State in the new
millennium, there was a great surge of optimism
that Nigeria, a giant in Africa, could use here normous
resources for political and socio-economic
development. Working in tandem with the global effort to eradicate
poverty in all developing nations, there was
expectation from the ordinary
citizens that their plight
would be a thing of the past in
no time. However, more than a
decade of democratic governance in Nigeria has not amounted to poverty
alleviation not to talk
of eradication. The seeming
efforts of government within the period have
not yielded positive fruits, but have
rather depreciated, decimated and disenchanted the poor
citizens, while feeding them crumbs when an advanced
socio-economic life should be their lot. This paper posits that there is a
missing link that needs to be bridged through empowerment of the poor and
increasing their influence on decision-making in the Nigerian State.
Keywords: Nigeria,
democracy, poverty, alleviation, eradication, governance.
Introduction
The 20th century
was described as the “century of the democracy”, yet in the 21St century, the quality of the democratic freedoms that people enjoy is an admixture of both that of the medieval and the modern epochs in political history of the world. And Africa,
with its chequered history of military misadventure in politics, was taken
further down the ages in terms of democratic
advancement. Nigeria, one of the worst hit by the military parody of political
leadership until just a little
more than a decade ago (even
though they are still present
in disguise) has had a history of
mis-governance which has in turn led to a decelerated socio-economic
development evidenced in the level of poverty in the country for which there has been need for eradication.
This is also the very first of the Millennium Development Goals, which is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by halving the population living
on less than $1 (dollar) a day and suffering from hunger. It is worthy to note that
Africa has been overtaken by the democratic appeal, the quest for good governance
especially after the era of military dictatorships, and Nigeria falls squarely into the
mould of the nations that were in dire need of not just democracy, but good governance
as well. The long years of military misadventure in
politics left a lot
of developing countries like Nigeria in the lurch politically,
socially and economically; and allowed them to wallow in
the throes of excruciating poverty, illiteracy and diseases.
Therefore,
the bulk of the world’s poorest people are in Africa; and as noted by Adejumobi
(2000:2):The debilitating poverty of the people
accentuated by the economic crisis seems to have provided a basis and indeed, a
common platform in the demand for democratic change by the people. Thus, the struggle for democratization in Africa has relevance not only in liberalizing the political arena and
achieving civil and political liberties, but also to ensure better living
standards and social welfare for the African people. This search for democratic
governance involves going beyond reforming the institutions of democracy as is presently
going on (or supposed to be going on in Nigeria) but taking a step further in
ensuring that democracy becomes an apparatus for citizens’ empowerment and
participation in the process of decision-making. This would help government to
work effectively on the main elements of democracy – accountable
governance,
participation, citizenship and rights (Madavo, 2005).Given the above scenario,
the problem antiques, which this paper intends to discuss, are: How can poor citizens
influence poverty eradication programmes and how are their priorities
taken into account in policy formulation? How can the promotion of democracy and
poverty eradication
programmes be integrated at policy and implementation levels? Does government
provide the poverty-ridden citizens the opportunity of being heard and their problems
solved? These questions will guide our paper and in the
process lead us to discovering any lacuna
between democratic governance and
poverty eradication in the 21st century Nigeria.
Theoretical Framework
The
structure of a democratic government and the roles or functions it is supposed
to play in a policy for socio-economic development is of paramount importance to us in
this paper. Thus, we shall adopt the structural-functional approach in
our analysis of this paper, as it is
very relevant to our
understanding of the poverty eradication drive of the Nigerian political
leadership since the turn of the century. As noted by Charles worth (1967), structural-functionalism explains
the basis for the maintenance of order and stability in society, and the relevant
arrangements within the society, which maintain the said order and stability.
The structural-functional theory is a distinguishable approach primarily
because of the selective aspect
of social reality that it seeks
to describe largely in terms of structures, processes, mechanisms
and functions. It revolves around two main concepts for which it is known: Functions and structures,
on the basis of which three basic questions have been raised: (a) what
basic functions are fulfilled in any given political system? (b) by
which structures? And (c) under what conditions?
While functions deal with consequences of patterns of actions, structures
refer to the arrangements within the system, which performs the functions. The basic assumption of
the structural-functional framework is that all systems have structures, which can be
identified, and those structures perform specific set of tasks if they are
to remain in existence. Political systems are compared in
terms of the manner in which structures
perform the expected functions in society. All political systems are involved
in the input-output functions,
which involves the citizens getting involved in the activities of the State, while the latter
works towards the interests of the former. The
structural-functional analysis enables us establish the relevance
of the structures created
by government to eradicate poverty in Nigeria, and whether these structures
have played any significant
role in the lives of the people. It will further help us understand the level of participation
of the poor masses in the decision-making in government of the Nigerian State.
Democracy, Governance and
Poverty in Nigeria
While there seems to
be a consensus on the conceptual meaning of democracy as a form of government that gives all
members of the society certain freedoms to exercise their rights,
we chose to take the definition of governance given by the World Bank (2008): Governance is defined as the
traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This
includes the process by which governments
are selected, monitored and replaced;
the capacity
of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and
the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic
and social interactions among them. Governance has political and economic
aspects; the former deals with the way a nation
is governed; how the citizens, institutions, and government
articulate their interests, mediate their
differences, exercise their rights and obligations, and agree in
a relationship. In this regard, governance deals with
how power is exercised, how open the political process is, how
decisions are made, and how much participation citizens are
allowed in decision-making and in the management
of public affairs. The economic aspect deals mainly with how societal resources are managed
and the role of governments in the process of socioeconomic development. The economic
aspects also provide the context in which corporate governance is
practiced by setting the laws under which corporations are established
and the regulatory framework
for the conduct of corporate affairs. In
developing nations like Nigeria, where satisfying basic
necessities of life is still a challenge,
the definition of governance has taken an inclusive form. Good governance thus includes
effective participation in public decision-making and
management by citizens, accountability,
legitimacy, transparency, the rule of law, and an open and enabling environment
for addressing socio-economic problems. This requires participatory democracy and
capacity by governments to respond to the demands of development.
The emphasis should be on open
governance, as participatory government is
not a sufficient condition for good governance.
Expression of citizen demands, whether for services, accountability, or transparency,
is futile without a government willing and able to listen and respond. A democracy
without effective
administrative capacity is an empty shell. As such, good governance
is not only about providing an open and free political atmosphere; it also
requires a government with the
capacity to raise the standards of living and quality of life of the people (Adesida, 2001).The slow progress,
the manipulation of the process, and the resulting disenchantment as
prompted doubts as to whether participatory
democracy in Africa will thrive or collapse in the near future.
After analyzing the recent wave of democratization in Africa and the daunting challenges
faced by African societies,
Adesida (2001) concluded
that “… the majority of Africa in the
absence of global fiscal munificence, may
–
once the internationalvogue with democracy
recedes
–
be cut looseto drift their own
way, sliding back into political strife, dictatorship and
military rule”.
Thus, the capacity of
leadership in Nigeria to respond to and address critical challenges such as:
achieving sustained high economic growth and development, meeting basic needs such as food, shelter, housing, clean water and electricity, providing better access to
education and health, increasing
agricultural productivity, ending civil strife and wars, and reducing poverty
substantially hinges on whether Africa is able to institutionalize good governance.
Conversely, addressing these factors will also determine whether the current wave of democratization
will be sustained and become the norm in the 21st century,
with the attendant socio-economic development. There is a nexus between
democracy, governance and
poverty in Nigeria. Scholars have
tended to be on the two
divides as to this connection but many of them believed that the very substance of democracy
cannot be completely detached from the living conditions of the majority of the citizens. For these
scholars, democracy, to be meaningful, has to have a strong social
content designed to give the poor and the disadvantaged a
clear stake in its institutions and politics (Olukoshi, 2000).The link between democracy and
governance is such that the one cannot be attainable without
the other, and the latter socio-economic impact, poverty, would definitely
prevail where the former is unstable.
This thesis is predicated on the contradictory gulf between the ideal
and practice of democracy and governance in Nigeria. Everyone
seems to be agreed that the concept, democracy,
is a simple one that essentially involves the principles of checks and balances,
adequate revenue allocation formula that engenders parity and helps people to
live comfortably
and freedom to live within
one’s fundamental human rights. It also involves periodic elections
that throw up representatives and political leaderships for the provision
of basic amenities to the people.
Lending credence to this, the International IDEA (2001:216-217) notes: In the
history of electoral politics in Nigeria, the vital connection between elected
and electors necessary for a liberal democracy has been missing. That is to
say, the political responsibility of elected public office holders, their
accountability to the electorate, and the sanctity of the electoral process all
remain elusive… the level of political will needed to ensure the
realization of this objective has been absent or has yet to take firm
root in the country’s political culture. This
lack of political will on the part of government
has been noticed in the state of poverty in which Nigeria
has found itself. Conceptually, poverty is a state of inadequate command over,
or inadequate access to, resources to satisfy wants which are
considered normal by the value system of a given
society (Aboyade, 1976). Its basic features are lack of basic social amenities,
malnutrition, diseases and ignorance. It also involves the setbacks resulting
from the problems of policy
inconsistencies, disharmonies, lack of focus and contradictions inherent
in the rural development programmes in any country (Ogugua, 2006; CBN,
1999;World Bank, 2001). Ajakaiye
(2002), following the trend of the other authors mentioned have conceptualized
poverty in four ways: lack of access to basic needs; lack of or impaired access
to productive resources; outcome
of inefficientuse of common resources and as a result of ‘exclusive mechanism’
in the system by certain
groups to exclude others from participating in economic development and the democratic
process. He
equally delineated between structural and transient poverty, the one being the persistent
or permanent socio-economic deprivations linked to a host of factors such as limited productive resources,
lack of skills for gainful employment, endemicsocio-political and
cultural factors and gender. Transient poverty is temporary or
transitory, and is linked to natural and man-made
disasters; it is reversible but can become structural if it persists. The causes
of poverty, according to Ajakaiye (2002) are unemployment, ignorance,
high level of inflation, poor
governance, corruption and environmental degradation. Fukuyama
(2000) had noted that there is a level of poverty where
economic activity is undertaken
for the fulfilment of basic natural needs. Thus, poverty is a relative rather than
the absolute
concept arising from money’s roles as a symbol for worth. Okoye and Onyukwu (2006) in giving the dimensions
of poverty noted that the concept has undergone about four changes
over the past decade. First, there has been a shift from a
physiological model of deprivation,
focused on the non-fulfilment of basic material or biological needs to a social
model of deprivation, focused on
such elements as lack of autonomy, powerlessness, lack of self-respect/dignity,
etc. The social model is about incorporating issues of political and
conomic rights
and social justice into the antipoverty programmatic framework. Second, there has been renewed emphasis
placed on the concept of vulnerability and its relationship to poverty. Third, the
concept of inequality, and its relationship to poverty, has re-emerged as a central
concern. Fourth, the idea that poverty should be conceptualized as the
violation of basic human rights has been painstakingly argued of late by
United Nations system agencies, among others. Nigeria is a poor country plagued
with bad leadership and this has become one of the greatest insults to the
average Nigerian citizen. As noted by Ilo (2008:173): Poverty robs people of
their humanity and disrobes them of their sense of self. Poverty inferiorizes a
person. It degrades a person and reduces
self-confidence. Poverty closes the
door to life. It makes
life a tale of pain and sorrow and a journey into the uncertain land of want
and frustration. Poverty makes people powerless and voiceless; it denies them
the opportunity to actualize themselves and invest in themselves for the
enrichment of our common
humanity. Poverty … is the greatest weapon of mass destruction in the
present world. He goes further to state that poverty in Nigeria is
anthropological. When persons are bereft of
their identity, their dignity, their freedom,
their thought, their history, their language, their faith universe,
and their basic creativity, deprived of all their rights, their hopes, their ambitions – they
sink into a kind of poverty which no longer concerns only exterior
or inferior goods or possessions
but strikes at the very being, essence and dignity of the human person. “It is this
poverty which we call anthropological
poverty. This is an indigence of being” (Ilo, 2008:174). Thus,
Umezurike (2006) conceptualized it as:
A social condition in which
an individual, for example, is forced to live
below the minimum level of
subsistence acceptable to the society due not necessarily
to the role that individual plays in the social reproduction of wealth, but
rather, arising from the unsuitability of the mechanisms for the distribution
of social surpluses in the society for which the state plays the central role. Sachs
(2005) distinguishes between three degrees of poverty: extreme or absolute, moderate
poverty and relative poverty. Extreme poverty exists when households cannot meet
basic needs for survival and are chronically hungry, unable to access health
care, lack the amenities of
safe drinking water and sanitation, cannot afford education for some or all of their
children, and lack rudimentary
shelter, clothing, shoes, among others, it occurs only in developing
countries. This was corroborated by the World Bank (2001) and Ajakaiye (1998).Moderate
poverty occurs when basic needs are barely met, while relative poverty is
generally construed as a household income level below a given proportion of
average national or community income. For
technical and statistical purposes, poverty is usually measured by establishing
a poverty line, set at some multiple of income necessary to buy sufficient
nutrition. Thus, the World Bank’s benchmark is $1 per day per person, measured
at purchasing power parity (PPP) to determine the number of people in extreme
poverty, while income $1 per day and $2 per day can be used to measure
moderate poverty. Based on this grading, half of Africa’s population is deemed to
live in extreme poverty. Writing on democracy dividends vis-Ã -vis political
violence in the Nigerian State, Ibeanu and Luckham (2006) noted that democratic
governance has not reduced corruption, assured more equitable distribution of
oil revenues, nor has it ensured their reallocation to poverty reduction. The country is constructed
around patronage and money politics, and structurally resistant to any kind of
reforms. This fact is further amplified by Sanders (2008)when she notes: The
cancer of corruption, especially systemic corruption, is among the most
powerful forces undermining good governance and poverty alleviation in Nigeria,
siphoning financial resources and creating barriers to investment, commercial
activities, economic growth and most importantly, to development. Assessing poverty
reduction strategies in Nigeria, Tomlinson (2002) adds to the debate on Nigeria’s
poverty eradication programmes by noting the two main problems with the traditional
top-down approach to fighting poverty. According to him, the first is that
poverty programmes are designed on the basis of what poor people need…well-intentioned
governments assume what poor people need, which contrasts with what poor people
think they need. Secondly, programmes that are designed by the central
government have lacked membership at the community and local government levels,
which in turn are needed for sustainability, and sustainability needed for
maintenance. For this reason, several programmes, including many here in
Nigeria, have languished, failed and disappeared. Perhaps, one of the most
incisive analyses of poverty and government visions and policy implementations
was made by Obasi (2001) when he disclosed that the poverty situation has been
exacerbated by the implementation of free market reform structural adjustment programmes
(SAPs) in the country since 1986, which had the dual objectives of reducing
the demand for imports as well as domestic goods and services to
stabilize the ailing economy of Nigeria; and restructuring it to make it more
flexible and growth-oriented (Obasi,2001:17-18).
However, SAP measures resulted in overall adverse social consequences as the cutback
in overall government expenditure on goods and services meant
higher prices for education, healthcare,
housing, water, electricity, transportation, food items etc. The downsizing
of the public sector meant unemployment, privatization and commercialization
of public enterprises
transferred public wealth into the hands of the few rich and privileged Nigerians
who have access to the funds
needed to buy off the public
enterprises, and the devaluation of the local currency reduced the country’s purchasing power
globally, and made imports very expensive
and local products extremely cheap for foreigners (Obasi, 2001:19-21). Adejumobi (2006) had
gone historical in his analysis of the African continent and the challenges of democracy
and governance in the 21st century.
He notes that the military experiences
of most African States left them yearning for democracy as they felt that was
the only way to escape the insidious political demobilization
and economic decapitation that had meant poverty,
disease and illiteracy for the population. However, having got democracy,
they discovered that it had a
lot of frailties, uncertainties and sometimes reversals. He notes further
that the international political economy was responsible for
the manner democracy and good governance
has been largely understood in Africa. He
accuses the international financial
institutions like the IMF and World Bank of being only interested in how the
global market could be made to
progress with Africa and in Africa given the enormous and often tapped
resources abundant in the region. Thus, the various recipe
given by these IFIs rarely work in Africa for
many reasons. Ashe noted:
Underlying the litany of
Africa’s development problems is a crisis of good
governance. By governance is meant the exercise of political power to manage a nation’s
affairs. Because countervailing
power has been lacking, state officials in many countries have served their own
interest without fear of being called to account. In this way, politics becomes
personalized and patronage
becomes essential to maintain
power
… The environment
cannot readily support a dynamic economy. The causes and dimensions of the
crises in Africa are well-documented (see Onimode, 1988; Sandbrook, 1993;
Ravenhill, 1996; Mkandawire, 1995; Szeftel, 1998) but then the issue
of governance keeps coming up as a recurring decimal because “governments do not
govern and often link the organizational capacity to manage society and promote economic
change and social welfare” (Adejumobi, 2006:7). This is
the cause of the disorientated society we have in Nigeria and
the reason why poverty has become more or less a birth right for more than half of the Nigerian population. Presently, 70.8% of the Nigeria
population lives under $1 per day (World Bank, 2008).
Poverty Eradication
Strategies in Nigeria
The Nigerian government’s
development plans in the late 1980s became mainly concerned with poverty
alleviation “when an unprecedented erosion of people’s living standards owing
to the prevailing global recession” (Okoye and Onyukwu, 2007) became the lot of Nigerians. Thus, there was a flurry of policies aimed at
resolving this social malaise, and,
given the military quick-fix
method, by the end of 1998, more than fifteen poverty alleviation
institutions had been set up in the country, some of
which were the Structural Adjustment
Programme (SAP), Agricultural Development
Programme (ADP),Agricultural Credit
Guarantee Scheme (ACGS), Directorateof
Food, Road and Rural Infrastructure
(DFRRI),
National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Better Life Programme (BLP),Peoples Bank of
Nigeria (PBN), Community Banks (CB),
Family Economic Advancement
Programme (FEAP), National
Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA),Strategic Grains Reserves Programme (SGRP) among others (Gberevbie et al .,
2007).However, since the democratic government of Obasanjo which took off
middle of 1999, the Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP) was introduced and
later jettisoned as a result of what the government called inefficiency. In its
stead, the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) was formed in 2001
with four schemes
– Youth
Empowerment Scheme (YES); Rural Infrastructure Development Scheme (RIDS);
Social Welfare Services Scheme (SOWESS); and Natural
Resources Development and Conservation Scheme
(NRDCS). There is also the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy
(NEEDS).The major aims of all these were to ameliorate the suffering of the
people by providing them employment opportunities and access to credit
facilities to enable them establish their own businesses (Gberevbie et
al., 2007; Omeje, 2007; NAPEP, 2008). This is
a follow-up to the UN World Summit for Social Development (2005), which had broadened the definition and
measurement of poverty from using income as a yard stick, to a definition that encompasses
other dimensions of poverty such as access to health services and education.
As the Summit noted: More recently, that definition has been further expanded
to embrace concerns about risk and vulnerability, social exclusion, powerlessness
and lack of voice or representation. For the policy maker, the correlations
between the various dimensions of poverty offer an expanded set of policies
relevant to poverty reduction.
In Nigeria, NAPEP is a
central coordinating agency for government’s anti-poverty efforts from the local government level to the national level, and is primarily
focused on poverty reduction. Some of the merits of the
programme, according to Aliyu
(2001:12-13)are:-It adopts the participatory bottom-up approach
in programme implementation
and monitoring;-It
provides for a national
framework that lays emphasis
on appropriate
and sustainable institutional
arrangement;-It provides for pro-active and affirmative action’s
deliberately targeted at women, youths, farmers and the
disabled;-It provides
for inter-ministerial and inter-agency cooperation;-It provides for the participation of all registered political
parties, traditional rulers and
the communities;-It provides
for technology acquisition and development particularly in the real sectors, agriculture and industry;-It provides
for capacity upgrade
for existing skills acquisition and
training centres;-It provides for the provision of agricultural and industrial extension services to rural areas;-It provides for institutional development
for marketing of
agricultural and industrial products;
and-It provides for
integrated schemes for
youth empowerment,
development of infrastructure,
provision of social welfare services and exploitation of natural resources. Despite
these lofty plans, a number of factors have contributed to the failure of past poverty alleviation
efforts of the government. According to Egware (1997) and Ogwumike (1998), the major and
general problems are inconsistency of the various programmes; poor implementation;
official corruption (government and public servants alike), poor targeting mechanisms
and failure of government to focus directly on the poor. Specifically,
NAPEP does not seem to be different from the previous programmes as it is still the usual top-down approach; thus, the conception that the design of the programme is problematic. Moreover,
since ignorance is a major cause of poverty in a developing nation like Nigeria,
the NAPEP design should have involved the adult education agencies in order to reach
the various rural communities who are hard hit by poverty. Furthermore,
women and their poverty plights were not adequately taken care of in the design of the NAPEP
policy beyond the talk of affirmative action. It is a fact that poverty affects women more
than their men-folk; a special programme should have been designed for women in the NAPEP
design, but this is not the case. As corroborated by NAPEP (2008): As
a result of the various poverty reduction initiatives and programmes,
government surveys show that poverty incidence in Nigeria dropped to 54.4% and
41% in 2004 and 2005 respectively. However, respondents affirm that poverty
eradication programmes have not significantly affected them
positively.