AN ANALYSIS OF THE NATIONAL POVERTY ERADICATION PROGRAMME (NAPEP) IN Ado=Odo Ota Local Government Area,OGUN state NIGERIA

1.1.Background to the Study

Poverty is multidimensional. It includes various alienations and deprivations such as lack of human capabilities, poor life expectancy, poor maternal health, illiteracy, poor nutritional levels, poor access to safe drinking water and perceptions of well-being (Anyanwu, 1997). However, issues in poverty now include physiological and social deprivations, vulnerability, inequality, violation of basic human rights (World Bank Report, 1999), and the observable disadvantage in relation to the local community or the wider society or nation to which a deprived individual, family, household or group belongs (Zupi, 2007).

Although poverty is a global phenomenon, the level of the problem in developing countries has reached alarming proportions. Globally, about 1.2 billion people are living in extreme poverty of less than one dollar per day. Due to the high prevalence of poverty, reducing it has been of grave concern to many countries in the past few decades. Though, there have been lots lot of improvements in developed world, such cannot be said of developing ones especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where poverty is prevalent due to many factors which include poor governance and political instability, poor economic management, mismanagement of resources, poor programme implementation, corruption and lack of purposeful leadership (Babatunde, Olorunsanya and Adejola, 2008).

The Nigerian situation especially has been described as a paradox. This is because the poverty level contradicts the country‟s immense wealth. Among other things, the country is enormously endowed with human, agricultural, petroleum, gas, and largely untapped solid mineral resources. Rather than recording remarkable progress in socio-economic development, Nigeria retrogressed to become one of the 25 poorest countries in the world

(Ekpe, 2011). The 2010 poverty index indicated that 60.9 percent Nigerians now live in absolute poverty (Baba-Ahmed, 2012). Most of these poor people reside in the rural areas.

Poverty is pronounced among the rural dwellers in Nigeria because the people are backward and underdeveloped in terms of minimum human standard of living. In the rural areas, the following are evident: the roads are bad, women and children walk barefoot and trek long distances to get water and firewood; pupils study under trees; there are dilapidated and ill equipped health centres, poor education, lack of facilities and opportunities, natural disasters and economic upheaval as well as crime and violence. These are due to neglect and inconsistence in the poverty reduction policies and programmes of successive governments since 1960 in Nigeria (Aderonmu, 2010).

The rural segment of the population in Nigeria is important in a number of ways. They provide the bulk of the food which is consumed nationwide and sometimes exported. They constitute the resource base of the nation and provide needed labour for industries and other service organizations located in the urban areas (Jibowo 1992). It is unfortunate that these substantial human and material resources in the rural areas are allowed to waste away.

The problem of the rural areas is however rooted in the immanent nature of post-colonial Nigerian state which created rural-urban dichotomy during the colonial period. The rural people that form 73 percent of Nigeria‟s population with vast wealth are left in waste because of neglect (Yakubu and Aderonmu, 2010). This is due to imperialism of the British that colonized Nigeria. The development patterns that the colonial masters fashioned out were for the accumulation and development of the imperial nations. This involved the concentration of development programmes in the urban areas. Only resources were taken from the rural areas and no efforts were made to develop them. This laid the foundation of the structural underdevelopment of rural Nigeria. The elite that took over from the colonial masters imbibed the ideology of development practised by their predecessors. They were equally

urban biased in the distribution of their development programmes. They deliberately developed the urban areas and neglected the rural areas (Akeredolu-Ale, 1975).

The Nigerian colonial state did not lay a solid foundation for the development of post- colonial state as it was fashioned to fail. This argument is in itself controversial because the fact remained that the post-colonial state inherited weak structures from the colonial state. However, one would have thought that 52 years after independence would have been adequate enough to lay a good foundation for economic transformation. The character and the nature of post-colonial state were such that the development issues were not properly articulated by the leaders. The Nigerian leaders were preoccupied with local politics as well as the struggle for power and who gets what to the detriment of fashioning out economic policy that would engender national development.

The discovery of crude oil in commercial quantity and its accruing petrol dollars that would have improved national economy and the living standard of rural inhabitants did not approximate reality. Rather, it worsened the problem of rural poverty. Indeed, it led to the neglect of agriculture and cash crops productions that contributed 70 percent to the economy before the discovery of crude oil. The government no longer gives primary importance to rural development through agricultural fed industrialization and self sufficiency in food production (Jega and Waliki, 2002). This has led to the rural-urban migration as people are no longer interested in residing in rural areas. The drift of the youth and school leavers to urban areas compounds the issue in the sense that, youths who constitute the productive force in rural areas now reside in the cities looking for non-existing white collar jobs. This has led to the increase in violence, crime and youth restiveness in urban centres.

As a result of constant public outcry on the state of rural poverty, successive Nigerian governments embarked on a number of programmes geared towards poverty reduction in Nigeria. Some of these include but are not limited to Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural

Infrastructure (DFRRI) in 1986, Better Life for Rural Dwellers in 1987, National Directorate of Employment (NDE) in 1986, Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP) in 2000, National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) 2001 and National Economic Empowerment Development Strategy (NEEDS) in 2004 and the current transformation agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan‟s administration in this regard.

All these programmes failed as they could not meet their set objectives because of poor policy implementation, corruption and inability of the government to explore the democratic approach to governance. The various poverty alleviation programmes were not deep. There was no sincerity in the Nigerian elite‟s development programme agenda in the rural areas. Much attention seemed not to be given to the fact that beyond government‟s efforts, the rural people themselves can meaningfully contribute to the development of their welfare (Alila, 1998).

It is therefore, imperative to investigate the factors which may have impeded effective policy implementation and development of the rural areas over the years in Nigeria.

The thesis of this study therefore, is that poor implementation of government‟s policies over the years have contributed greatly to rural poverty in Nigeria, using the case and conditions of Ado-Odo Ota rural communities, Ogun State as representative.