Despite social investment programmes, NBS says northern states dominate list of 82.9m poor Nigerians
Despite budgetary allocation of N2 trillion by the Federal Government for its highly criticised National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) in the last four years, latest poverty data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is suggesting that the initiative has failed to achieve the purpose for which it was created.
The 2019 Poverty and Inequality in Nigeria report released by the NBS on Monday says 82.9 million Nigerians are living in poverty. The last poverty data released by the NBS was in 2010 which says 62.6% of the population (102.2 million) was living in poverty.
The social investment programme, created to tackle poverty, hunger and the root cause of poverty across the country, commenced in 2016 with an annual budget allocation of N500 billion which has been sustained since then for the past four years gulping N2 trillion since 2016.
The SIP was part of the government’s plan to bridge the social inequality gap and pull the most vulnerable Nigerians who live below $2 per day out of the poverty line. To address this, the four programmes under the NSIP include – the N-power programme designed to assist the unemployed between age 18 and 35 to acquire and develop life-long skills with a stipend of N30,000 monthly; Conditional Cash Transfer of N5,000 monthly stipend to directly support those within the lowest poverty bracket. Others include the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme, a micro-lending intervention that provides loans (Trader Moni) between 10,000 and 100,000 to petty traders, artisans, enterprising youth, farmers and women and the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme aimed at increasing school enrollment by feeding children in public schools from class one to three.
In the last four years since the programme commenced, a larger percentage of the beneficiaries have been from the northern part of Nigeria which has been identified by international organisations as the poverty capital of Nigeria. The World Bank in a report released in February 2020 had estimated that 87% of all the poor people in Nigeria are in the north and said poverty rates in the southern zones were around 12 percent with little variation across zones. In a 2019 report titled “Nigeria Economic Update”, the World Bank had warned that number of Nigerians living in extreme poverty might increase by more than 30 million in 2030.
Data of beneficiaries of Conditional Cash Transfer obtained by The ICIR in April 2020, revealed that of the 35 states and the Federal Capital Territory, North West region had the highest number of households benefiting from the cash transfer with 561,758 households. The North Central has 321,434, North East 109,442, South South- 67,696, South West- 37,904, and South East- 27,977 households.
President Muhammadu Buhari while speaking at a retreat for Ministers-designate in Abuja on Monday August 19, 2019 had said his administration’s plan is to “lay the foundation” to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty at the end of his term in 2023.
“Our Administration’s eight years will have laid the grounds for lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years. This outcome will fundamentally shift Nigeria’s trajectory and place us among the World’s Great Nations,” Buhari said.
On August 1, 2019, he had boasted that his administration had lifted 5 million Nigerians out of poverty in three years, claiming his administration was able to achieve the feat through the NSIP.
However, the new NBS poverty report, which represents 40.09% of the total population and excludes Borno state, says 52.10% of rural dwellers are living in poverty while the poverty rate in urban centres is 18.04%. It further shows that Northern states remain the poorest as nine of the top 10 poorest states in the country are from the norther region.
Sokoto, Taraba with at 87.7 percent poverty and Jigawa with at 87.0 percent poverty are the three states with poorest people in Nigeria, while Lagos and Delta have the lowest numbers at 4.5 and six percent respectively.
The new report puts to question the impact of the much touted NSIP with an annual allocation of N500 billion. Exactly a year ago, in May 2019, Aisha Buhari, wife of the President publicly critised the SIP, declaring that the social investment scheme has failed in the North.
“In my state (Adamawa), one local government benefitted from it, out of 22 local governments. I didn’t ask what happened and I don’t want to know, but it failed woefully in Kano; it’s not a good sign and it’s not a good thing,” she lamented.
The latest NBS data is giving credence to the criticisms of Mrs Buhari and many other Nigerians.
The Special Adviser to the President on Social Investment, Maryam Uwais, who supervised the programme between November 2015 and September 2019 when it was under the office of the Vice President, in her reaction to criticisms of the NSIP, denied that the scheme had gulped N2 trillion since 2016 when it was created.
According to Uwais, the total appropriation by the National Assembly from inception is N1.7 trillion but the actual funds released for the NSIPs between January 2016 and October 2019 (when the NSIPs were handed over to the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development) was N619.1 billion, 36.4 per cent of the total appropriation from the National Assembly. She noted that the release of funds covered operational activities and payments to 13,363,680 beneficiaries across all the four NSIPs.
A Cash Transfer Officer with an international agency who spoke with Neusroom on condition of anonymity, however, faulted the NBS data and indicted some northern states for always inflating the figure of vulnerable and poor people in their states in order to get more support from international agencies and the federal government.
“I’ve not taken time to properly study the report, but from what I have read so far I can categorically tell you that most of those figures are falsified by the northern states identified as states with the poorest people. They do it all the time to get larger share of any social intervention coming from the Federal Government or international agencies,” he told Neusroom correspondent.
“The problem with the CCT just like the school feeding programme is that there is no exit plan, government is just giving people money, it is not enough to just put money in people’s hands, what’s the plan for them to sustain themselves and not depend on government forever,” he asked.
