A Call To The Redefinition Of Poverty -By Ogala Osoka

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) defines national poverty as yearly spending below N137,430 or N376 per day. By this definition, 82.9 million Nigerians live in extreme poverty. This means if you randomly count ten Nigerians, at least one would be living below N376 in a single day. The average cost of a plate of food in Nigeria is N500. Due to population growth, international authorities had projected that the figure would have increased by 2 million Nigerians in 2020, however, with other factors like the pandemic, economic decline and inflation, the figure jumped to 102.1 million people in the same year. Over half of the country is now living in extreme poverty.

Yet the future of the country seems bleaker. In May, 2020, food inflation rose up to 15.04%, which was recorded as the highest at the time. However, the national figures of 2021 show that the figure increased to 23% in April. Experts say that the figure is a lot worse. Many people would point to the crash in the economy and the high unemployment rate, which stands at 33.3%, as the cause of the multi-dimensional poverty that the country deals with. However, it seems most likely untrue. Lack of food and lack of jobs are all symptoms, or if you like, effects of poverty, and not its causes.

Perhaps one of the most misconceptions about poverty is that it is the lack of resources. This is not true as it would show in a speech given by the POTUS in 1949.  United State President, Harry Truman, in aspeech, implored for a program that would be aimed at making the benefits of the United States’ “scientific advances and industrial progress available in improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” Harry Truman, in this speech, attributed the cause of poverty to a lack, and he proposed that filling up that lack would lead to poverty’s end, especially in countries like Nigeria. It was his speech that propagated the beginning of United States global Foreign Aid programs. Decades later, Nigeria is still poor despite various efforts of the International communities. It is said that the United States spends over a trillion dollars to alleviate poverty every year, yet 16 million Americans still live in poverty.

Development assistance from rich countries to poor countries has significantly increased, from $37 billion in the 60s to $134 billion in 2015. As at 2016, the World Bank had supervised over 1,000 projects in 143 underdeveloped countries, which totaled almost $200 billion. This does not include donation from private nonprofit organizations. Yet with all of these interventions, poverty seems to be like a vast unending hole that just swallows all of these good intentions with no hope of restitution. Perhaps what we require is a different approach.

The assumption that poverty is lack of money has motivated people into plunging into the illogical search for money, opining that if they can have more money, then they can escape the grip of poverty. However this shows only to be an illusion, as the poor man seems to find that the more money he makes the more needs he generates. Hence, he is a microcosm of the larger African society, where it is seen that no matter how much the international community comes to her aid, her poverty seems to be an overflowing pool of lack. The average poor man, in dealing with poverty as lack, has a seemingly formidable task. He has to shuffle his limited time between providing for his daily needs and building wealth. His first inclination is to sell his time and labor for resources, yet living in a capitalist world, this proves to be futile. Even if he can get a job, he would most likely be underemployed. He would barely make enough to feed, let alone, have any left to build any wealth. However, if the lean chance that he is paid well expresses itself into his reality, then the poor man soon realizes that his needs expands to fit into his new condition. Therefore, he only becomes a poor man with more money.

Tunde thought he was lucky when he got a job with a Bank in 2004. He was 24, fresh out of University, with a new job that offered to pay N250,000 every month. Technically, with an income of that size, Tunde was not a poor man. Ten years later, Tunde was now being paid N350,000 in a month. However, he was now married with three children. Adding the inflation rate and the more mouths to feed, Tunde was technically a poor man. Tunde would think about increasing his income, however, he barely has the time or the money to invest in anything else aside his current job. To make matters worse, the rise in unemployment has made sure that Tunde had more responsibilities at work. Tunde’s mistake, like most of us, is that he we equate a lack of money to mean the presence of poverty and, invariably, the presence of money to mean the lack of poverty.

One only has to look at famous and wealthy celebrities of the past who have gone broke today to realize that the presence of money does not necessarily mean the absence of wealth. The main question seems to be what purpose money has. Many Nigerians would easily shift towards the perspective that the only purpose of money is to buy satisfaction. This is a common idea; that money only exists to give us a lifestyle that we would otherwise be unable to afford. The original idea of social class was to create a structure within society so that there easily is a division of labor, where the king has his space to perform his duty and his nobles and peasants all found their spheres for the greater good of the society. Admittedly, such social hierarchy is pointless in the modern world; however the rise of capitalism gave rise to class struggles where the lower class worked hard to get membership cards into the upper class – the rise of the middle class.

The rise of the middle class meant that social class was immutable, and the fact that one was born poor did not mean that one had to die poor. Yet it also meant an abuse of resources in order to maintain wealth. Laborers were paid meager sums in order to improve profit, and they were encouraged by the rich to work hard. Hard-work, they insisted, was a virtue. Whereas, in actuality, the more the laborer works hard, the lesser he has. The lesser laborers are paid, the more profit corporations make. Today, this fact is obvious when the average increase in inflation is compared to the average increase in salaries. Corporations would rather invest in a Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) than pay their staff enough to feed with.

The effect of this sort of system is chaotic madness in which poor people struggle to become rich, and not necessarily build wealth. They struggle to be like the wealthy, and when they realize they cannot be wealthy due to prevailing economic and working conditions, they settle for appearing wealthy. To appear wealthy means to show more wealth than one really has; hence, to appear wealthy is fundamentally more expensive than actually being wealthy. This seems to be the root cause of the Nigerian’s problem, who sacrifices the solution to his problems on the altar of appearing wealthy. He would rather eat richly, and wear expensive clothes, and build gigantic houses, and ride in expensive cars, regarding all of these displays of glamor erroneously to actual wealth – he would rather do all these than actually solve his problem of poverty. Consequently, Nigeria is one of the poorest countries in the world but has the most glamorous buildings. Eastern Nigeria is said to be one of the dirtiest and poorest places but is also littered with houses that costs millions of dollars, houses built in slums. The average Nigerian sees money as a tool to display his social grandeur. Yet this is not the purpose of money as we shall see.

The history of money can be traced back to the Feudal systems when Agricultural structures allowed the creation of societies. Money was a legal tender that is used to measure the worth and value of goods and services. Before then, a trade by barter system was used whereby the quantity of goods was compared to one another for exchange. Before an object can be used to measure the value of other objects, it should be portable and have a value of its own. Precious metals were used in the context. In this sort of system, money had value, and person who had money simply had value. In such an environment, one who did not have money is said to be in poverty.

However, as capitalism became more popular and people sold their labor for money, precious metals fell out of use. It would not profit the corporations to pay laborers in gold, for instance. Something less valuable had to be adopted. What is less valuable than paper? However, this meant that money did not have value anymore, and a man who had money could not be said to have any value. What such person would be required to do to have money and value was to tie his money down to things that have value, like gold or a means of production. This way, they were using their money to buy value. This is why today; nobody calculates the money one has to find out their net worth. They calculate their assets, that is, their valuable properties. A man who has money is not wealthy; as such a man has no value. He would have to trade that money for value, for him to truly have wealth.

The main problem of the average poor man, then, is that he spends so much time working for invaluable money that he has no time to trade it for value. Faced with this dilemma, he trades the money for symbols of value – houses, cars, etc. But these are not value in themselves. Elon Musks, one of the wealthiest men in the world, does not have a house. Does that mean he does not have value? Of course not. In fact, it has been shown on studies that it is the people with the least money that buy luxury items the most. Hence, what the poor man needs is not more money, as the more his money increases, the more his needs expand. What he needs is education. He needs to be educated how to trade the little money he has for real value. When more Nigerians and Africans have this education, Africa would be developed in a few years. However, it easy to realize that this is not something many wealthy corporations would want. Africa has been described as the biggest market. In effect, Africans buy more than they produce. If they wish to increase value, they would begin by producing the things they need and only buying things required to produce. This would not be good for mega international industries. Hence, they would keep giving and borrowing African countries money to sustain their dependency mentality.