Since the beginning of the Obasanjo tenure in 1999, up to this day of Yar'Adua and or Goodluck, poverty eradication has been one of the cardinal objectives of the Nigerian government. To that effect, the government has embarked upon numerous poverty eradication programmes all with the same objective but with different names. The amount of money budgeted for each of them per annum is enough to to reduce poverty through the appropriate ministries.
The problem I think is that the Nigerian system is just filled with power hungry men and women who will come up with absolutely anything in order to be relevant in the sphere of things. To be very honest, I think it is very silly to spend millions of naira on a project which has yielded absolutely no sustainable results. The poverty rate in the country is at a steady increase yet there are millions being budgeted every year to "eradicate" poverty. The concept itself is senseless and is just a show of how dubious and ignorant our so called leaders are. Thomas Malthus said that poverty was part of a natural cycle so if you ask me, thinking of eradicationg poverty will be just as good as trying to eradicate disease which is practically impossible. nobody has gotten rid of diseases in any part of the world yet but the developed countries have good health care systems for their citizens and proper facilities to deal with the problems when they come. The same is applicable to poverty "reduction". Our government should e more concerned about how to put some structures in place to improve the rate of poverty in the state and not establish non functional parastatals to syphone public funds in the name of poverty eradication.
BOTTOM LINE: government should review some of it's programmes because povert eradcation is only a myth which by the way was disregarded decades ago.....shows just how backward we are
Emmanuel Osuji
