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Poverty And The Nigerian Economy
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The
big question is what are the causes of this poverty despite the
country’s immense wealth and natural resources? The shift in emphasis
from agriculture to oil exploration in the early 70’s is one of the
causes. These shift transformed
the country’s economy to a mono
economy making us to abandon other sectors that give us revenue like
agriculture. The fact that the resources generated by oil are not been
invested in the non oil part of the economy of which 90% of Nigerians
depend on for their livelihood is another issue. It has been estimated
that more than 80% of all poor live in the rural areas of which 92% of
them live in absolute poverty. And these poor people in the rural areas
are mostly into our abandoned agriculture, they are usually small
scaled.
Many administrations have tried eradicating poverty in the
wrong way, most administration think that by enhancing growth and
development of the cities that it would subsequently promote the
development of the rural communities by way of “trickledown effect’’ but
these rather created a wide gap between the people in the cities and
those in the villages. The villages became disadvantaged, isolated, dull
as the youth and able bodied men left the village to escape the rural
drudgery and also search for white collar jobs.
Nigeria has in its
own way tried to eradicate poverty through many poverty alleviation
programmes which were geared towards reduction of poverty in the
country. The poverty alleviation and development plan started in year
1994, the structural adjustment programme of 1986, the national
accelerated food production project, the poverty alleviation programme
of early 2000 which looked at employment and crime wave among the
youths, the operation feed
the nation of 1976, USAID of 1975 but so
far all these programmes have failed to obtain their objective which is
reduction of poverty.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The problem of
poverty in Nigeria is not to be entirely blamed on lack of sufficient
resources but also on the allocation and management of these resources
that are available for use.
Despite the fact that monetary measures
is simple studies have shown that these measures are deficient
(Revallion 1996). Revallion argues that poverty is multi faceted;
therefore multi indicators are necessary including measures of real
expenditure per adult access to non market goods like health and
education. Hence for effective poverty measurement there is needed to go
beyond money metric measures. It is necessary to employ multi
dimensional approach in which expenditure on market goods is placed side
by side with “non income goods’’ and indicators of intra household
distribution. These will help us to understand the causes of poverty
more so that better policies that can fight poverty can be formulated.
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]This research study by means of robust statistical analysis investigated the poverty situation in Nigeria and how it affects the citizens and the economy at large. This research was taken in a period of 25 years which is from 1985 – 2010. The ordinary least square method was used to investigate this work.The empirical analysis carried out showed that the Nigerian economy has changed from a diversified economy to a mono economy because of the over dependence of the oil sector and this has ... Continue reading---
