By Sani Adamu
A report of the United Nations (UN) says that the poverty rate in Nigeria has gone up from 46 per cent to 76 per cent in the last 13 years.
A report by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) also reveals that more than 60 per cent of people living in the northern part of the country live below the UN-prescribed poverty level.
Besides, a recent World Bank’s global poverty rating placed Nigeria among the five poorest countries in the world.
The report revealed that most Nigerians lived on less than one U.S. dollar (about N157.6) per day.
Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank President, while releasing the report at the April 4 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings in New York, the U.S., emphasised that Nigeria had one of the largest concentration of poor people.
He said that Nigeria ranked third among the poorest countries in the world, while India ranked number one with 33 per cent of the world poor.
According to him, China is ranked second with 13 per cent of the world’s poor, followed by Nigeria where seven per cent of the world poor live in.
Equally worrisome is the statistics released by the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), which listed Bauchi, Jigawa and Yobe among the states with the worst poverty indices in Nigeria.
Analysts, however, note that these negative trends crop up in spite of Nigeria’s recent ranking as the 26th largest economy in the world and the largest economy in Africa.
These scenarios, among others, underscore the wisdom in the appeal of Nigeria’s award-winning artiste, Dapo Oyebanjo, popularly called Dbanj, that African leaders should use the opportunity offered to them by the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit to look at ways and means of fighting poverty on the continent.
Dbanj is attending the summit as an ambassador for ONE. Org, an international non-partisan, non-profit, advocacy group that fights extreme poverty and preventable diseases, particularly in Africa.
It also raises public awareness, while pressuring political leaders to support effective agricultural policies and programmes that are aimed at saving lives and improving the people’s future.
Dbanj, who spoke in an interview by American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News on the sidelines of the summit in the U.S., said that African leaders should invest in agriculture, as part of efforts to fight poverty.
“The reason I came to the summit is to tell African leaders to invest in agriculture because it is so key for us to know what we have.
“Agriculture has been seen to be the fastest way of eradicating poverty and creating jobs across Africa.
“For me, coming from Africa, it is vital for us to know what we have.
“When I was approached 10 years ago, at the start of this campaign, African leaders called me and said 10 per cent of their annual budget will devoted to agriculture.
“By the end the campaign, we had one to two million African youths saying they want to support agriculture.
“For me, first of all, the theme of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit is why we are here. It is investing in the next generation, and I’m glad and privileged to be from the next generation,’’ he said. [eap_ad_1] Dbanj stressed that many African youths, through hard work and sheer determination, had excelled in their chosen careers, adding that for instance, he was able to achieve success in the music industry 10 years ago without a good record label in existence then.
“Because we believed in ourselves and in what we had, we continued and now, music is the biggest export from Africa after oil and gas,’’ he added.
When asked what he would tell U.S. President Barak Obama, Dbanj said: “I will urge President Obama to make sure that the African leaders implement whatever decisions they reached at the summit because we have what it takes to unravel the wealth in Africa.”
Prior to the summit, Obama launched the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) in 2013.
The scheme allowed 500 young African leaders, including those from Nigeria, to broaden their skills in their fields of expertise, as part of efforts to provoke self-reliance and poverty reduction, particularly among the youth
Addressing African youth activists in Washington during the launch of the initiative, Obama said: “The security, prosperity and justice that we seek in the world cannot be achieved without a strong, prosperous and self-reliant Africa.
