POVERTY!!: Why The Government Should Take Responsibility and Not Your Village People(Part 1)

I can see you’re beguiled by the title or else you wouldn’t be here. The average Nigerian blames his misfortunes most times on a seemingly unassuming group of people in a rural settlement. The eponymous “village people”.

Back to Basics

Now back to basics, Nigeria slipped into a technical recession in 2016. In 2018, we were declared the world’s poverty capital having overtaken India with 87 million Nigerians living in extreme poverty ultimately representing nearly 50% of our estimated +180 million people and blah blah blah…

A Myopic Sentiment

But, I’m not here to remind you of our status quo in the world. That would be opening up old wounds. But, rather I want to hold us up on our failure to hold our leaders accountable and putting the blame on our family members in the village.

A myopic sentiment which has been parodied multiple times on our pop culture that it’s even commonplace.

The average Nigerian is trapped in a fragmented society where hard-work, skill and talent doesn’t necessarily correlate with success and worse, the so called prosperity gospel has further exacerbated that trap by enslaving people with stereotypical mindsets of poverty and lack of wealth as being caused by superstitious delusions as regards to improper policies made by the Government.

The government basically has the power to lift millions of people out of poverty with proper policies and economic actions and they aren’t being held accountable sufficiently, instead the blame from every individual’s perspective is on personal superstition.

We Need to Hold Each Other Culpable

We’ve come to a point where we need to ask ourselves questions. Ask our legislators what they are doing for us in parliament. Thanks to technology, we even have means of tracking how the government spends our budget on both state and federal levels.

We need to hold each other culpable to move forward and be at the helm of building Nigeria to greater heights.