WHEN the government of President Muhammadu Buhari launched the National Social Safety Nets Programme under the National Social Safety Nets Coordinating Office (NASSCO) in 2015, I was under no illusion that the government was on a merry-go-round in its fight against poverty. This is because our people say you teach someone how to fish rather than give him or her fish. So, thinking of ending poverty through handouts like trader money, market money and conditional cash transfers is not only strange to logic, it is alien to human reality.
Sometimes I concluded that the World Bank, which designs some of these programmes intends to keep the Third World nations perpetually in poverty. But I also reverse with the thinking that, Africans or the Third World nations that implement such programmes need not lap them up like hungry dogs. Why don’t they internalise the programme and modify it in a way that works well in line with the reality of the clime involved?
After the Federal Government had secured $500 million in funding for the project in 2017, the NASSCO office organised a meeting with selected Abuja Editors. The meeting was to bring the media up to speed on the operations and processes of the programme. The coordinators who briefed the media announced that they had what was almost a foolproof measure to collate data and that the Social Register had been compiled across the country. I remember we asked questions as to what the components of the data relied upon to designate someone as “poorest of the poor” and other such sloganeering lingo.
I was happy the media men at the event wrote off the method and declared that such was not the way to lift people out of poverty. The consensus then was that a programme that would lift Nigerians out of poverty must be largely homegrown, with necessary foreign support. It would not deviate so far from the culture of the people but seek to let out their productive instincts. The culture of begging is seen as a dehumanising act in many African societies. Many Africans believe that only the desperately frustrated would engage in such an act and having people wait for monthly handouts reduces their human esteem. But that was what the NASSCO programmes were hitting at.
Little wonder it never recorded any adulation except the derisive comments associated with market money and the largely invisible conditional cash transfer, seen as mere election campaign tricks of the Prof Yemi Osinbajo era. When in 2019, the programme was elevated to a full-fledged ministry, called the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, it was clear the job for the boys’ agency had gathered more muscle. In the current dispensation, it is called the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Inclusion, even though nothing of such is reflected on its website.
A peep at the website of the ministry gave its mandate thus: “To develop humanitarian policies and provide effective coordination of National and International humanitarian interventions; ensure strategic disaster mitigation, preparedness and response; and manage the formulation and implementation of fair focused social inclusion and protection programs in Nigeria.” Its vision is: “To have social protection systems that are proactive, humane, inclusive and sustainable for the improvement and general welfare of the people.”
With the stories of alleged corruption linked to the ministry in recent times, it appears that the ministry has outlived its relevance, even in its short lifespan. The ministry has obviously been creating humanitarian disasters instead of alleviating poverty. Investigators of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC) have been working their socks off these past weeks to unravel alleged mismanagement of N44 billion under the Hajia Halima Shehu-led National Social Investment Programme Agency (NSIPA); another probe of N37 billion money said to be missing under the headship of Hajiya Sadiya Umar-Farouq, the immediate past minister and the alleged manhandling of N585 million by the suspended Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Dr. Betta Edu.
So do we need all the high-sounding acronyms designed by the ministry to wipe our money out of the government’s coffers? I am sure we don’t. And that is where I blame initiators of such programmes linked with the World Bank. If none of the Western nations or China that are calling the shorts at the helm of the financial pyramid got there by handing fish to their people, but by teaching them to learn the act of fishing directly, how would the opposite of that turn around the fortunes in Africa? The basic problem that afflicts the Third World is the absence of data and information. Even when the government designs subsidies, there are no assurances that such would not be cornered by greedy bureaucrats, unconscionable middlemen and wicked government officials. That is why the government and its policies must avoid anything that would bring officials in contact with raw money meant for distribution to the people.
Instead of doing that, the people could be encouraged to organise themselves into cooperative societies alongside the line of their trade where funds/loans could be made available in accordance with the capacities of their businesses. Even the blind, deaf and the disabled can equally be grouped. I am sure such groups exist anyway, where they can easily be accounted for and reached with government support. Last week, I spoke to two former ministers who confirmed that they have yet to come across one beneficiary of the social safety nets programmes since inception. One of them said he asked his people during a Christmas get-together and nobody owned up. The downtrodden are largely truthful. If any had come across the funds, they would own up. I’ve not seen one too in the five local governments that make up Ogbomoso land in Oyo State.
As I was about to conclude this piece, news broke that the Federal Government has suspended all programmes of the ministry, including N-POWER and conditional cash transfer. My advice to the government is this; re-denominate 50 per cent of the funds captured under the ministry into bursary awards for students in tertiary institutions; reinvigorate N-POWER to accommodate as many jobless graduates as possible, create a credit system in the economy to stem desperation and corruption and then channel like 30 per cent of the ministry’s funds into cooperative and thrift societies. Those societies helped to create a level of prosperity in the late 1970s and 1980s. We started losing it when we abandoned the communal spirit around cooperatives for micro-credit and microfinance institutions. After doing all that, the government should scrap the ministry and send its staff to agencies that can accommodate them.