Poverty worse in the South than North –Balarabe Musa

Question: In what ways do you think poverty can be tackled in this part of the country?


Answer: I don’t think we should be talking about the North, but the whole Nigeria, because poverty is everywhere in Nigeria. In fact, the North is even better off than the South when we talk about poverty because if you lose any opportunity of earning salary income, in the North here you have opportunity to go the farm. In the South, it is not so easy because you may not have the land. You can see that the effect of poverty in the North is at the lower level than the South, because in the South, if you can’t get salaried employment and you have no capital to go into business, it becomes a problem. Therefore, when we are talking about poverty, really, we should be talking about Nigeria. The level of poverty in Nigeria is very high. In fact, it is intolerable; it is even a shame that we have a government, yet we reach this level of poverty. The level of poverty in Nigeria has reached a stage that every Nigerian with very few exception, is forced to live on an earned income, that is something he has not worked for. This is even if he is employed by the government or in the private sector, the remuneration is not enough to sustain him. And there is hyper-inflation which is not controlled that is making things worse. If you can’t get paid employment and goes into business, which should have helped, but if you want to go into business and you want to take loan to do that, the bank interest rate is prohibitive. For instance, I borrowed a lot of money this year to farm. I was under the impression that interest rate for agric is 13 per cent. Which in any economy is still too high. But after the loan was secured, I found out that I would be paying a minimum of 25 per cent interest. We are now talking about the opportunity for ordinary Nigerian. He can’t be a farmer because he has no capital, or in some places he has no land. Or if he has capital and land, the problem of unstable prices is a problem. Generally, you can’t survive on agriculture, you cannot survive on salaried employment, and virtually the small businessmen can’t survive. In fact, virtually all businessmen, I mean you can see the number of industrial institutions in Nigeria that have closed down because there is no business, let us take the worst case. The textile industries, that we used to have up to 100 plus, but I doubt if we have now more than five functioning textiles industries throughout the country. This really tells about the level of poverty in this country. What do you think is the solution to this problem? The most important thing is to change the socio-economic system that controls development in the country, which is based on self-interest as opposed to public interest. It is this socio-economic system that is based on self-interest that has brought about this level of corruption, stealing and waste of public resources. It is this system that has brought about the survival of the fittest syndrome. It is this system that has brought about armed robbery. It is this system that has made every state of the nation negative, because the system is based on self-interest. If we want to change, we must change to public interest. We must understand that public interest is primary, self-interest is secondary. There is no way we can stabilise and progress in any society, if the environment is not based on public interest. It is public interest that even enables legitimate self-interest. That is why we socialists in Nigeria are committed to socialist reconstruction of the country starting with the leading role of the state in the economy to ensure peace, stability, social justice and progressive development throughout the country. We believe that is the only option. This system of the survival of the fittest, which has produced leaders who are thieves, cannot lead us anywhere.

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