Date Published: 08/06/09

NIGERIA: OVER- FED ELITE, HUNGRY KIDS
By Emmanuel Onwubiko

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Reading the front page story of the Nigerian Guardian Newspaper edition of August 4 th 2009 on the pathetic theme of “Malnutrition hits children in six states”, one is bound to be overwhelmed with trepidation, shock and disappointment except if one is a sadist of the crudest breed. One would be shocked and disappointed at that tale of misery and the cruel fate that awaits the children of our generation as told by The Guardian not necessarily because there are no existential body of evidence to show that poverty has afflicted an overwhelming majority of Nigerians said to be more than seventy five million people out of the official 140 million Nigerian population but rather at the timing, proportion and scale of the scenario.

Monumental shock and trepidation will naturally overwhelm any reader of that The Guardian story especially among the readers that are imbued with humane conscience because this sad story is coming at a time when documentary evidence has just shown that each of the senators in the Nigerian National Assembly has earned over N500 million as allowances irrespective of their levels of productivity.

The senators and their cohorts in the lower chamber have just proceeded on vocation with very little or nothing to show for these huge operational costs lavished on them from the public treasury even as millions of Nigerians wallow in unmitigated misery and poverty.

Before delving into the question why many Nigerians are starving in the midst of enormous natural endowments that abound in Nigeria it will be noteworthy to recollect that damming news report in The Guardian.

The Guardian has it that;

“Statistics rolled out by international and local bodies have shown that malnutrition and poor health services now account for more deaths among Nigerian children in seven states”.

“On the global chart, Nigeria is one of the two African nations listed among the 20 responsible for 80 percent of malnutrition in children, with states in the North rated as the major contributors to the country’s poor rating. In absolute terms, the number of undernourished under five Nigerian kids outstrips the population of some sub-Saharan African countries”.

The sad story goes further thus; “The nutrition indices, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recent report include 14 percent low birth weigh, 13 per cent exclusive breastfeeding, 14 percent wasting, 43 per cent stunting and 27 per cent underweight.”

“The report added that nearly three million under-five kids are wasted, and more than one million suffer from acute malnutrition, implying that every one in four children is underweight, particularly in northern part of the country”.

“The development is allegedly threatening the country’s quest to meet the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)”.

“The states worst affected in what UNICEF called “silent malnutrition emergency” are Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina, Kano, Adamawa and Gombe states. Kebbi has an under-five and maternal mortality of between 269 and 800 per 1,000.”

It was further revealed that with the current under five ranking of Nigeria put at 34, the situation, UNICEF claimed, could be compared with trends in war torn countries. Kebbi State is the place where Muhammad Adamu Aliero presided over as state Governor from 1999 t0 2007 before winning a fraudulent election to the Senate and shortly after was awarded with a juicy ministerial appointment to oversee Abuja, the nation’s capital by President Umaru Musa Yar’adua.

These statistics coming from a credible platform under the United Nations is reprehensible, disgusting and unfortunate especially because of the fact that some state governments have so far spent Billions of tax payers’ money in hosting the official visits of President Umaru Musa Yar’adua and his wife Hajia Turai who recently garnered N10 Billion from state Governors for the building of her cancer treatment center in Abuja. The other day, my state government of Imo reportedly splashed over a billion naira of tax payers’ funds to host the President who visited to witness the illegal defection of Governor Ikedi Ohakim from the Peoples Progressive Party under which platform he rode to power to the Peoples Democracy Party the so-called ruling party.

But if you think that this is the end of the sad story, then wait a minute.

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Reason: we have it on good authority that the current administration will spend a whooping N205,888,320 Million on food stuff supply for the Presidential state House and under the heading of miscellaneous in the same 2009 appropriation, the Federal Government budgeted N351,317,613 million for refreshment and meals. Analysts say that at the price of N7000 [seven thousand Naira] per bag, the total budget for food items which amounted to N205.888.320 million meant for Yar’adua’s state house would procure about 29,412 bags of rice which could comfortably feed an entire state for a month.

In 2008, N474 million was budgeted for the purchase of food items for the state House even as a princely sum of N1.5 million was reportedly spent by the immediate past Peoples Democratic Party -led federal administration for providing reading glasses for presidential aides that are domiciled in the presidency so that they could see national issues. Wonders indeed shall never end in the seat of political power in Nigeria!

Two worrying questions naturally arise from the above pathetic picture of reckless insensitivity of our political elite who feed fat on the public funds even when millions of Nigerians are daily afflicted by hunger, poverty, disease and want.

The questions are; why are the political elite behaving as if they are unaware of the scientific fact that poverty breeds insecurity in any nation that fails to lift their people to their better selves?

Secondly, how will Nigeria achieve the eight millennium development goals in 2015 especially in the area of poverty eradication given the fact that the current high level of bad governance and corruption in Nigeria have led to the progressive escalation of poverty?

For the avoidance of doubts, Susan E. Rice, one of the most widely traveled American diplomats, who is also very knowledgeable about Nigeria, did a researched paper where she rightly observed that poverty is not only a national threat but a trans-national or global threat to peace and development.

Susan Rice, the current United States permanent representative at the United Nations, writing under the theme “Global poverty, weak states and insecurity” made the following points;

“When American see televised images of bone-thin children with distended bellies, their humanitarian instincts take over. They don’t typically look at UNICEF footage and perceive a threat that could destroy our way of life. Yet global poverty is not solely a humanitarian concern. In real ways, over the long term, it can threaten U.S. national security. Poverty erodes weak states’ capacity to prevent the spread of disease and protect the world’s forests... It also creates conditions conducive to transnational criminal enterprises and terrorist activity, not only by making desperate individuals potentially more susceptible to recruitment but also and more significantly, by undermining the state’s ability to prevent and counter those violent threats. Poverty can also give rise to the tensions that erupt in civil conflict, which further taxes the state and allows transnational predators’ greater freedom of action.”

Suzan Rice gave the following counsel to her country’s political elite which aptly applies to Nigerian elite who are over-fed. She wrote thus;

“Americans can no longer realistically hope that we can erect the proverbial glass dome over our homeland and live safely isolated from the killers-natural or man-made-that plague other parts of the world.”

Similarly, Nigerian political elite who are over-fed should not look too far to find out why hundreds of thousands of desperately hungry and unemployed Nigerian youths rushed to join the so-called Boko Haram Islamic religious sect headed by the now allegedly ‘assassinated’ leader Mohammed Yusuf. Nigerian over- fed elite must accept the fact that brute force will not check similar revolts in parts of Nigeria if sincere efforts are not deliberately and realistically made to check the widening chasm between the haves and haves-not, between the few who are stupendously rich and the many who are so poor that they are unaware of sources of their next meals.