November 29, 2013 by Niran Adedokun

One of the telling signs of Nigeria’s undeveloped state is our inability to maintain accurate data about anything and everything. We just do not have the capacity, and we do not even know our exact population! The other thing that I find probably more sad than the lack of capacity to gather and maintain data is our failure to tell ourselves the truth about our situation or accept the truth when someone tells us from the outside. We get all defensive and even abusive; we just do not like to see ourselves in the mirror.

Just some weeks back, Mr. Festus Odimegwu, then chairman of the Nigerian Population Commission stirred the hornets’ nest when he queried the credibility of all the censuses  conducted in Nigeria in the past and warned about the failure lurking in wait for the 2016 exercise. The reaction that greeted his assertion was violent and it did not abate until the poor man was removed from office for nothing other than his failure to be politically correct; his refusal to watch the national mood and realise that there are just some things that should not be said. In the aftermath of his removal, I asked myself if Nigerians did not realise what the former chairman revealed. I know he was right, although he also did not say it all. The truth is that every section of Nigeria is guilty of this unfortunate manipulation, the level of ignorance in the country sees to that. Communities do everything to increase their numbers as they believe that doing so would determine the “goodies” that accrue to them when government eventually looks their way. So, what is all the fuss about? Sheer hypocrisy!

The most current example of our contempt for the truth is the argument about whether a 100 million Nigerians live in destitution as the World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Marie-Francoise Marie-Nelly, postulated last week. Marie-Nelly, who said this at the bank’s Country Programme Portfolio Review in Enugu, revealed that the number of Nigerians living in destitution makes up 8.33 per cent of the total number of people living in destitution all over the world. But trust our government never to lie low.  Earlier this week, the World Bank staffer got a piece of the mind of the Federal Government. In a statement issued by the Economic Adviser to the President, Dr. Nwanze Okidegbe, government boldly refuted the claim.

Among many other things, Okidegbe’s statement said:  “Rather than engage in peddling easily disprovable and inaccurate poverty numbers, we believe it would be better for the World Bank to focus its attention on designing programmes and interventions to support the government’s efforts in accelerating poverty reduction in Nigeria.” The only thing that came to my mind after reading this statement was to ask the presidential aide to kindly tell us the exact number of Nigerians living in destitution since he was so sure that they were not up to 100 million. My bet is that he would not be able to say.

How then did Okidegbe arrive at the conclusion that the statement made by the World Bank chief was untrue? Even if I do not have any way to prove the veracity of the 100 million estimate, I am sure that it would be closer to reality than any figure that government may brandish anytime in the future.

To sustain my gut feeling, I thought that a good place to start was to search for the meaning of the word, “destitution”. The definition which appeals to me, according to dictionary.com is the one that describes the word as “deprivation, lack, or absence.” Now, can we in all conscience say that we do not have more than 100 million Nigerians who are deprived of the good things of life?

How many Nigerians live in humane accommodation for example? How many Nigerians can afford to provide balanced meals for their households? How many Nigerians have access to quality health care? What type of transport system do majority of Nigerians travel by? How many of our compatriots can send their children to the schools of their choice? Or, how many of our public schools even have desks and chairs for pupils? The reality is that the vast majority of Nigerians just manage to get by.

If you have ever visited any of our General Hospitals for instance, you would see the pathetic conditions under which Nigerians are treated. It gets worse if a patient should be admitted. I have seen patients admitted and placed on drip on the corridors of hospitals, even in Lagos State! Sometimes, they are placed on worn-out mattresses simply because there are no more beds inside the wards; sometimes, they are admitted on benches outside the hospital ward until some patients in the wards are discharged and beds open up. So, patients are left at the mercy of the elements as well as parasites like mosquitoes and other insects that feast on them. There is to my mind no better way to describe destitution, as if these Nigerians had a choice, they would be in private hospitals where they would be given the respect that every human being deserves.

If I had the opportunity, I would love to implore the presidential adviser to sound out some of the junior civil servants who work around him. A man who takes home the minimum wage of N18,000 would never be able to afford anything near a decent accommodation for example. It is from this meagre sum that he is expected to feed his family, transport himself to work, send his children to school, pay hospital bills when family members fall sick and take care of myriad other responsibilities including buying water for the need of his family, yet we say this family do not live in destitution. Are we waiting until they die?

Daily on the streets of all major Nigerian cities, you see hapless young men and women roam around in the name of job hunting. These jobs are not there and government is not ready to do anything for them. Thousands of Nigerians cannot afford meals in their homes, so every now and then, you see very long queues of people fighting to fill their stomachs with some cheap, badly prepared food which exposes them to cholera and typhoid, when most countries of the world have forgotten that such ailments exist.

As bad as things are however, no government is thinking of doing anything radical to alleviate the suffering of the masses in Nigeria. Our governments are not thinking about community health insurance for indigent Nigerians; no government has embarked on any housing scheme that could make things better for the indigent, even the concept of free education has been amended beyond recognition. Rather than ease our troubles, our government and its many agencies continue to impose more fines and duties on us, forcing us to obtain new driving licences and vehicle registration at costs that most Nigerians cannot readily afford.

And it doesn’t seem that they even understand how much they are driving the people further into penury. That is the impression that Okidegbe has. Rather than gloat over achievements that do not trickle down to needy Nigerians, I would expect people in government to take time to reflect over observations like the one made by Marie-Nelly. In case they are under any illusions, government officials should search their souls and see what new collaborations, across arms and tiers of government can bring succour to the people. It just does not end with statements which do not speak to our realities because as it is currently, this country does not just favour the poor. We are all living in destitution, one way or another.
Source : http://www.punchng.com/opinion/are-we-not-all-living-in-destitution-in-nigeria/