Poverty, Income Inequality Fuel Insecurity

Widespread poverty in Nigeria webbed around joblessness and income inequality have conspired to exacerbate the country’s security challenges, according to National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP).

NAPEP also reported that some 120 million out of 160 million Nigerians live below N300 per day.

Mukhtar Tafawa Balewa, national coordinator, NAPEP, who stated this when members of Centre for Creative and Leadership Development paid him a visit in Abuja, added that the situation in Nigeria is different from some countries like India, where there is poverty, but people have something to do to keep them going.

Balewa  said that unlike other countries, people in Nigeria are not working and this causes severe security challenges.

“Nigeria’s population is about 170 million, and we have up to 120 million people living below N300 per day. If that is a yardstick upon which to judge poverty, then we are in a very drastic situation,” he said.

According to him, NAPEP’ s role has been highly misunderstood because of the flagship role it played where the body provided tricycles to people which is now part of its appellation as Keke NAPEP, adding that the role of the organisation is far beyond giving people temporary succour.

“This misunderstanding about the kind of role NAPEP is playing is undermining the organisation.

“Of course, the general image people are having is that we are not better than our flagship project of some years ago called Keke NAPEP. “If anybody thinks of NAPEP they think of Keke NAPEP which is not fair to the intensions of government when they set up the organisation.

“NAPEP came to co-ordinate and collaborate with other agencies to ensure that the high level of poverty in Nigeria is reduced.

“There is a lot of youth and women empowerment. There is a lot of need for rural development and to arrest the drift between the urban and rural areas. “Again, there is a lot of negative impact recently from climate change that we are finding with flooding, and the perenial likelihood of it getting worse as a sustainable weather partern change,” Balewa lamented.

Quite some time now we are expecting that people are going to be affected over night from having houses over their heads and even children and family being negatively affected by this flooding.

“It was considerable last year. It came as a shock but in response, NAPEP because of its nature as a poverty reduction organization, we set up a mechanism within our organisation to what we call post-emergency programme. This post-emergency programme addresses the lacuna of the gap which exists when emergency relief agencies to leave,” he said.

The National Co-ordinator noted that when the emergency agencies retire, NAPEP takes over to rehabilitate the people who have lost everything they own in life.

Earlier, Mr. Abdullahi Dago, leader of the centre, had wanted an explanation of NAPEP’s role to the nation and the connection with Keke.