The Federal Government recently said state governors were partly responsible for the rising rate of poverty in the country. It blamed the state chief executives for prioritizing the construction of heavy pieces of infrastructure such as bridges and airports in cities rather than improving the lives of the people in rural communities.
The shift of blame was made during a study on strengthening local governance in Nigeria by members of the Senior Executive Course 44 of the National Institute of Strategic Studies, Kuru who discovered that local governments are not allowed to operate as they should. That until local governments are given the free hand to operate, they will continue to remain underdeveloped. –
Also, Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Clement Agba attributed the poverty rate to governors’ misplacement of priority at the State House shortly after the Federal Executive Council meeting. Agba noted that 72 per cent of the nation’s poor reside in rural communities, said governors had abandoned the critical demography, preferring to spend state resources on the capital cities instead.
It is however obvious that governors are basically functioning in their state capitals and are not working in the rural areas. And democracy that we preach about is delivering the greatest goods to the greatest number of people. And from our demography, it shows that the greatest number of our people live in rural areas, but the governors are not working in the rural areas. It is obvious that 70 per cent of the people live in rural areas. They produce 90 per cent of what we eat. And unfortunately 60 per cent of what they produce is lost due to post harvest loss and it does not get to the market.
The Minister also lamented that despite the federal government’s intervention to alleviate poverty, the results did not reflect the amount of investment made in the area. He said, “In the course of working on the national development plan, we looked at previous plans and asked why they didn’t do as much as expected. We also looked at the issues of the National Social Investment Programme.
In as much as the Federal government is blaming the governors for poverty in the country, they are both to be blamed, for when the head is sick, the whole body is affected. For we will see that the governors are the elephants in the room and of course, we also recognize that the governors are complaining because of over-centralization of power in the exclusive functions. And for the federal level, the government is putting out so much money but not seeing so much reflection in terms of money that has been put into alleviating poverty, which is one of the reasons the government also put in place the national poverty reduction with growth strategy.
The truth of the matter is that the local government need autonomy to function because if the local community and the grassroot is not governed, we have no excuse complaining that bandits have taken over our communities because local governance, the community, the grassroots, is the foundation of a democratic process, that’s where the people belong and because governance is not effective, people have devised self-help, survival-coping mechanism.
Therefore, both the Federal government and state governors should own up, take responsibility and functions of duties seriously and should stop apportioning blames. Rather, there should be serious supervision and checks henceforth as duties are delegated. As House of Assembly members should also rise in their duties.
