Early in the morning of Wednesday September 19, 2018, I switch on the television and proceeded to channel 306 on DSTV/Multi-choice satellite network, to enable my little son, NaetoChukwu Nnadozie, watch a programme for children packaged by the publicly-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). But my son opted to leave the room for the parlour to link up with the mother, who was preparing stuffs for his pre-school session.

I then switched on to a Nigerian-owned television to listen to the 7AM News, but was immediately irritated by the soft tissues of fabricated falsehood that was packaged by the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) as a news item: They told the broad daylight lie that the current Federal Government has made the claim of driving 10 million people out of poverty. Deep inside of me, I knew this was a primitive lie from the pit of hell. So I waited to see if the claimant would reel out verifiable data to justify this monumental embarrassment of waking people up with heavy dosage of lies. Such empirical data was never shown, but it was a wishy-washy politically correct propaganda meant to massage the ego of Nigeria's emerging dictator in civilian garbs. I will show proofs to show that these 10 million ex-poor people now transported to the world of prosperity by government only exists in the warped imagination of the government officials who authorised this unsubstantiated claim. As God would have it, a text message just popped into my phone. The following was the message which was clearly a distress message from a relation of this writer who is a graduate.

She stated: “Brother, good morning. How is mama? Please support me financially sir and connect me with any work sir. Thank you, sir!”

The above was a text message that dropped on my phone from a cousin who lives in Awka, Anambra State capital. Mrs Amaka has just left her husband with her three children because the husband Mr Obinna is unable to meet up with basic funding obligations to keep body and soul together.

Another Save-my-soul message also came in as I began scribbling this piece. In this message, the sender lives in Enugu and has just graduated from the university with distinction, since four years ago, but can’t find employment after her mandatory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). In her set, there were about 10,000 freshly minted university graduates; out of this phenomenal number, only an infinitesimal percentage managed to find job in the formal and informal sectors of the economy.

Miss Genevieve - the ravishingly beautiful girl in her early twenties - read economics. From interactions, she shows evidential proofs of someone at home with her field of study. Yet, she has no employment!

In response to her text message, I immediately called her to find out if she has a kind of self-employment that she has engaged herself in with a view to escaping from the trap of being trafficked for sex abroad, as is the case with hundreds of thousands of girls in her age grade.

Mind you, the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Human Trafficking, Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, recently ended a working visit to Nigeria. From my interactions with her at a forum organised for leaders of credible civil society groups - of which Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) was invited - she disclosed that Nigerian youngsters stand the risk of being trafficked for sex slavery in Europe because of a combination of forces of unemployment, insecurity and political instability that prevails in virtually all parts of Nigeria.

The young lady who holds the position of Special Rapporteur on human trafficking was very forthright and brutally frank in pinpointing the major factors responsible for human trafficking, just as she underlined poverty as one of the fundamental causes.

Her fears have severally been validated even from official quarters, such as the figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which paints gloomy pictures of widespread unemployment affecting mostly the young people. The youth in Nigeria clearly constitutes nearly 60 per cent of the national population

It, therefore, follows logically that if 60 per cent of the population can’t find employment, it means that Nigeria is gloomy, dangerous and, is in, imminent risk of economic collapse.

Poverty, dejection and hopelessness are existential realities of our time in Nigeria. This is why it shocked most discerning and thinking Nigerians when the Minister of Budget and Planning was quoted as claiming, without any shreds of empirical data, that President Muhammadu Buhari’s government has taken 10 million Nigerians out of poverty. For a start, the Ministry of Budget and Planning is a scam. This is because political leaders hardly implement budgets to the full. In the last 20 years of democracy, successive administrations, including the incumbent, have not successfully implemented any annual national budget to appreciable percentage. Budget is called appropriation and it is constitutional. But officials violate with impunity the provisions contained in every yearly budget. From this background, most Nigerians often take with a pinch of salt any unscientific claims emanating from the federal ministry that supervises violations of a basic law, such as the yearly appropriation Act of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The claim of producing 10 million millionaires literally, to most Nigerians, is fake and unverifiable.

The claim triggers the question: How do we determine the precise location, identities of these mysterious 10 million “millionaires” created by the current administration. Are these 10 million millionaires recently minted by Muhammadu Buhari's administration located in outer space or in this nation of Nigeria weighed down by grave uncertainties? To show that this claim is false, we visited the National Bureau of Statistics to know the number of hitherto employed people who lost their jobs due to the economic recession.

A total of 7.956 million Nigerians became unemployed between January 2016 and September 30, 2017 – data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

This unemployment report survey for the third quarter of 2017 released by the NBS on December 22, 2017, puts the number at 7.956 million more than the 8,036 million it stood in 2015 Q4. The bureau in the report stated that the number of Nigerians that became unemployed rose from 8.036 million in 2015 fourth quarter to 15.998 million in the third quarter of 2017. The report said further that between the second quarter and third quarter of 2017, the number of economically active or working-age population (15-64 years of age) increased from 110.3 million to 111.1 million.

“The unemployment rate increased from 14.2 per cent in Q4 2016 to 16.2 per cent in Q2 2017 and 18.8 per cent in Q3 2017. The number of people within the labour force who are unemployed or underemployed increased from 13.6 million and 17.7 million respectively in Q2 2017, to 15.9 million and 18.0 million in Q3 2017.

“Total unemployment and underemployment combined increased from 37.2 per cent in the previous quarter to 40 per cent in Q3 2017.

“The labour force population increased from 83.9 million in Q2 2017 to 85.1 million in Q3 2017. The total number of people in full-time employment (at least 40 hours a week) declined from 52.7 million in Q2 2017 to 51.1 million in Q3 2017.”

NBS in the report blames the increasing unemployment and underemployment rates on Nigeria’s fragile economy, despite the exit from recession. The report explained that the domestic labour market is still fragile and economic growths in the past two quarters of 2017 have not been strong enough to provide employment in Nigeria’s domestic labour market.

“An economic recession is consistent with an increase in unemployment as jobs are lost and new jobs creation is stalled.

“A return to economic growth provides an impetus to employment. However, employment growth may lag, and unemployment rates worsen especially at the end of a recession and for many months after,” the report noted.

During the third quarter of 2017, according to the report, 21.2 per cent of women within the labour force (aged 15-64 and willing, able, and actively seeking work) were unemployed, compared to 16.5 per cent of men within the same period.

The report also noted that underemployment was predominant in the rural areas, as 26.9 per cent of rural residents within the labour force were underemployed, compared to 9 per cent of urban residents within the same period.

The Federal Government, however, told the crude lie when it claimed that it has moved 10,073 million Nigerians from poverty to prosperity.
The Minister of Budget and National Planning, Sen Udoma Udo Udoma, made the claim while speaking on arrangements for the 24th Nigerian Economic Summit held at the conference room of the ministry in Abuja.

He said the achievement is one of the key priorities of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), by investing in the people.

According to him, “The government had provided 8.96 million school children (with food) under the home-grown School Feeding Programme; over 297,000 poor and vulnerable Nigerians supported with cash transfer of N5,000; successfully disbursed more than 308,000 loans of N50,000 under the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) and 200,000 young unemployed graduates empowered through the N-Power scheme, while over 308,000 had been selected for consideration for the second batch.”

While the government was busy dishing out lies regarding some mysterious 10 million new millionaires that emerged as a result of direct impacts of the economic programmes of the Buhari administration, those who should know, however, reminds us that Nigeria has entered a tragic position in the world as the nation with the largest concentration of absolutely poor people. Mind you, World Bank says“you are absolutely poor if you can't afford to generate $2 USD per day,” which means that virtually all the government paid employees who earn the minimum wage of N18,000 monthly are absolutely poor.

In The Guardian of Wednesday, September 19, 2018, we read that rapid population growth in some Africa’s poorest countries could put future progress towards reducing global poverty and improving health at severe risk, a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has revealed.

Co-Chairman of the foundation, Bill Gates, said in the Foundation’s 2018 Goalkeepers Report launched a day before the newspaper's publication that young Africans were inheriting a continent where fewer and fewer people have to struggle to survive and could, instead, devote their energy to planning and investing in the future.

However, the report disclosed that demographic trends show that over one billion people have lifted themselves out of poverty in the past 20 years, but added that population explosion, particularly in Africa, could be a challenge given the decline in the number of extremely poor people in the world, and it may even start to rise.

Nigeria was said to have taken over as the country with the highest number of extremely poor people, according to a report by Brookings Institution, thereby overtaking India with a population of 1.3 billion people, as against Nigeria’s 200 million.

According to the report, the number of Nigerians in extreme poverty increases by six people every minute.

“Population growth in Africa is a challenge,” Gates said on the telephone about the report’s findings.

It found that poverty in Africa is increasingly concentrated in a few countries, which also are among the fastest-growing populations globally.

It projected that by 2050, over 40 per cent of the world’s extremely poor people will live in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria.

On the best ways of tackling the growing population and poverty challenge, Gates said improving access to birth control was key, adding that this should be combined with investment in health and education of young people.

“The biggest things are the modern tools of contraception. If you have those things available, then people have more control of spacing their children.”

The report, tracked 18 data points on United Nations development goals, including child and maternal deaths, stunting, access to contraceptives, HIV, malaria, extreme poverty, financial inclusion and sanitation.

In its family planning section, the report called on policy-makers to empower women to exercise their right to choose the number of children they could have when to have them and with whom.

The UN data has projected that Africa will account for over half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050, while its population is projected to double by 2050, and double again by 2100.

Aside poverty, insecurity and threats of Islamic terrorism constitute a grave challenge, thereby making it difficult for millions of Nigerians to break out of the terrible poverty trap.

•RIGHTSVIEW appears on Wednesdays and Saturdays, in addition to special appearances. The Columnist, a popular activist (www.huriwanigeria.com, www.emmanuelonwubiko.com), is a former Federal Commissioner of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and presently National Coordinator of Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria (HURIWA).

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