16 causes of poverty in Nigeria

Generally, there are some detrimental causes of poverty in Nigeria. The Central Bank of Nigeria gave an assessment of the causative factors, including overpopulation, which is the situation where a large population chases few resources, and too little space, which arises from high population density, scarcity of resources or both. The following factors are responsible for poverty in Nigeria.

1. Inadequate education: Inadequate education often stands as a bottleneck in any economy; education plays an important role in economic growth and national productivity as well as innovation and democratic values. Illiteracy as well as a lack of education is common in poor countries. This is because governments in sub-Saharan African countries lack the resources to provide adequate public schools in rural areas, such that less than 60% of children in sub-Saharan Africa have an elementary education. Most times poor people in these countries drop out of schooling to enable them to concentrate on making a minimal wage for a living. This prevents people from having the opportunity to secure decent jobs and opportunities to develop themselves to enable them to fully participate in society. In Nigeria the educational system is very poor when compared with other countries in the world.

2.Environmental degradation: Environmental degradation is another factor that leads to poverty. It includes natural calamities such as wars, floods and rainfall disasters, as well as pollution of bodies of water, soil and forests, which impoverishes the quality of the natural environment. This induces transitory poverty, which arises from environmental problems in the form of food scarcity and shortage of clean water, housing materials and other important resources including natural resources such as land, water, forests and air. People whose lives depend on these natural resources suffer directly from the effects of environmental degradation.

3. Unemployment:A high rate of unemployment may also be responsible for poverty in Nigeria. The inability to get good jobs that produce a decent income leads to low productivity. In addition, many graduates wander the streets without any reasonable prospect of gainful employment in Nigeria. The unemployment rate in Nigeria is estimated at 23.9%

4. Bad governance: Involves misrule in the exercise of power and lack of accountability in managing social and economic resources towards economic growth. The sub-Saharan countries, including Nigeria, are characterised by lack of managerial skills, reckless spending, lack of transparency in resource allocation, poor implementation and monitoring of programmes, mis-spending of loans and waste of public resources, which usually weakens and deteriorates economic growth.

5. Structural changes: Are more permanent depending on many (exogenous) factors like scarcity of resources, lack of skills and location disadvantage, which may cause poverty. Other people who are inherent in the social and political set-up include the disabled, orphans, landless farmers and households headed by females, who form a group that cannot contribute to GDP but live as dependants, which tends to increase abject poverty in Nigeria.

6. Macroeconomic shocks and policy failure: The shocks and natural disasters faced by many countries in the world through expansion in aggregate demand policies and terms of trade have led to macroeconomic disequilibrium in the balance of payments. This calls for major policy reforms, which may prevent vulnerability to poverty. The macroeconomic shocks and policies taken, constrain the poor from using their greatest asset – labour – to improve their productivity.

7. Rural-Urban migration: Rural-urban migration may increase poverty, especially when a greater proportion of the individuals who migrate are unskilled migrants. This may lead to limited resources and overcrowding, which may subsequently lead to poverty. Migration could also lead to brain drain when skilled personnel leave a country; this reduces the pace of economic growth and slows down the process of overall job creation, subsequently affecting the long-term development potential of a country, which may eventually increase poverty.

8. Health or disease: Ill health shackles human capital, reduces the productivity of labour, reduces return on learning, impedes entrepreneurial activities and holds back growth and economic development. This is because it limits the opportunity to access employment and also leads to increased day-to-day costs. The major diseases that cause poverty in most countries of the world are malaria, HIV and AIDS and other infectious diseases. The prevalence of HIV and AIDS is about 5.4% in Nigeria, such that a population of about 2.6 million adults are infected. This has constrained participation in the labour market and has prevented affected labour from earning income

9. Debt burden: Debt burden increases poverty because the cost of servicing the debt owed becomes an encroachment on the resources needed for socio-economic growth and development in many less-developed countries of the world. The masses are therefore subjected to abject poverty because of constraints that led to low productivity, low capacity utilisation, underemployment and low purchasing power in Nigeria. In December 2000, Nigeria’s external debt was $28.5 (about 80% of GDP). The huge amount of money used to service this debt annually hampers government expenditure and thereby reduces the provision of social and physical infrastructure for the poor.

10. Low productivity: This inhibited the abilities of individual households to earn enough income to enable them to maintain adequate living standards. This arose from low utilisation of resources or low human capital development, which is a reflection of low education, poor health or physical incapacity, as well as inadequate access to productive assets.

11. Market imperfections: These are factors that have arisen from institutional distortions and have prevented people from having equal access to productive assets such that it has introduced a kind of discriminatory practice that limits people’s advancement in the society. These factors are caused by ignorance, culture, sex, age, race and so on. Distortions in the employment market and skewed income distribution structure also account for market imperfections that favour a particular class in society and render the less favoured class poorer.

12. Political instability: Social and economic unrest from the domestic and international scene arose from the failure of the government, which lacked the ability to successfully implement political transition programmes that may have actualised stability such that distortion resulted in recession. A restricted domestic market prevented productive ventures from flourishing because of and withdrawal of investment from such country and subsequent job and economic insecurity.

13. Corruption: Corruption has become a cankerworm in Nigeria such that government revenue is shared among political office holders and their cronies, while the masses are left to wallow in poverty. This indicates that the well-being of the people are practically ignored by political leaders. Thus, corruption has led to increased poverty and income inequality and has contributed to increased crime rates in Nigeria.

14. Oil over dependency: This simply attested that over-reliance on the oil sector led to the abandonment of other sectors of the economy. The mismanagement of huge oil revenues and fall in the world oil price resulted in Nigeria borrowing to finance white elephant projects that led to wastage. Subsequently Nigeria became a highly indebted country.

15.Inequality: Inequality implies having large discrepancies in resource distribution, whether one is considering income, consumption or other welfare indicators or attributes. Income disparity occurred in Nigeria as a result of the high economic growth that Nigeria experienced from 1965 to 1975. Income inequality has therefore increased

16. Laziness: Laziness is rampant among Nigerians and it has become a common disease most especially from youths who hail from wealthy households. Everyone wants to be comfortable, but they are not ready to work towards it. This often leads to greed such that people do whatever possible to keep the family wealth for themselves. In most families, everyone depends on the breadwinner, who works hard to keep the family going, and when he dies the family become poor because the dependants are lazy; they subsequently mismanage the funds that are bequeathed to them and become poor. In most Nigerian families, the death of the breadwinner means the death of the whole family’s fortunes; because everyone depended on him or her to provide for the needs of the household