NAPEP, poverty and matters arising

So much has been said about Magnus Kpokol and the agency he runs at the beginning of this year that one expected he should have been rusting in the Kirikiri or Gashua jail by now. However, like other corruption cases, raised by the National Assembly, since the era of probes began; the NAPEP probe has been buried and forgotten in the nation’s corruption cases archives. On February 2, 2009, several national dailies carried a news report, which stated that the Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu has presided over a plenary, where the Senate approved the motion to probe the activities of the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP). NAPEP, according to the Senate Committee on National Planning Commission, lacks direction and suffers from administrative perfidy. The Committee also accused it for failure to register a formidable impact on the lives of the Nigerian populace, in spite of the alleged huge budgetary allocations made available to it by the Federal Government. The NAPEP probe provided a rare opportunity to unearth the whereabouts of billions of naira allocated to the agency since its formation ten years ago, to alleviate the scourge of poverty. But the probe like others was abandoned.
The Committee was to probe into the purchase of the N2.4 billion 5,000 units of tricycle, popularly called "Keke NAPEP." The Committee’s Chairman Hajiya Zainab Kure told the Senate during the hearing that 70% of Nigerians leave below the poverty line, eight years after the introduction of NAPEP and despite the huge funding through appropriation and Millennium Development Goal (MDG) funding, the agency could not effectively impact on the lives of the less privileged Nigerians. Most of what has been heard of the agency was just on the pages of national dailies as each of its numerous mouth watering schemes ends with the grandeur of its official launching ceremony. However, eight months after the submission, nothing was heard of the probe.
NAPEP as it is today, constitute a waste and a huge financial burden with very inconsequential results. The total cost of the budget of NAPEP as provided in 2007, 2008 and 2009 is N3 billion and the level of poverty today from available statistics is estimated to be over 54.4% in 2004. Though different measurement techniques provide somewhat different data about the level and incidence of poverty, the general picture of poverty in Nigeria is indeed critical. We have to remember that the World Bank has earlier in 2001 estimated that 70.2% of Nigerians live on less than a $1 a day. And the National Bureau of Statistics noted that poverty incidence in 2004 may have been 57% not 54.4% as estimated. The fact that 50% of the population is poor is supposed to be a major concern for political leaders and policy makers. The rate of poverty in the nation is largely caused by unemployment and misplaced priorities from our political leaders. Studies show that an estimated 2.8 million graduates enter the labour market annually with little over 10% securing a job.
In its editorial of September 22, 2009 the Nigerian Vanguard reported that in 2005, an estimated 80 to 90 million Nigerians live in poverty; only India and China have more poor people. India and China each has a population over 1 billion to Nigeria’s 140 million. What is very clear from the foregoing is that in spite of claims by the NAPEP leadership that over 200,000 jobs were created in the last decade, the incidence of poverty is still high and unemployment remains a major problem. NAPEP, and to a large extent, other poverty alleviation programmes, designed to tackle poverty and unemployment are well articulated on paper, but in practice these programmes benefit ‘the boys’, selected by politicians, who were not in the category of the poor or unemployed. Therefore, hardly any poverty alleviation programme will have an impact because the real poor are left out in favour of party loyalists or relatives. The reality is that corruption, favouritism, nepotism and lack of political will from our policy makers in recent years have hampered the institution building efforts geared to address poverty and unemployment in the country.
In order to genuinely address the problem of poverty and employment in this country, government at all levels need to redirect their attention to addressing the problems associated with agriculture. For long we have abandoned agriculture, which is supposed to be the main stay of our economy. They should invest more on dry season farming as is done in some states like Kano, Sokoto and Kaduna. Governments should also try to invest more on social sectors, such as health, education, etc. leading to enhanced human capabilities and improved living standard of living. There is also need to review all our anti-poverty and empowerment programmes and initiatives in the country. However, all these can work if the Federal Government on one hand and the National Assembly on the other hand are guided by the desire to serve the people that voted {?} them to power.