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Waste + want = poverty

By Dan Agbese
26 October 2018   |   3:30 am
It has become a mantra mouthed by our leaders with some fervour as if they are saying something for which they should be applauded. Poverty is ravaging our country.

Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited

It has become a mantra mouthed by our leaders with some fervour as if they are saying something for which they should be applauded. Poverty is ravaging our country. Yes. You don’t have to hear that from them to know what you know only too well. We see it all around us – the ugly face of poverty in the distended stomach of the kwashiorkor children; in the toppling of the middle class from their private bungalows to multiple occupier buildings, known as face-me-I-face-you.

The World Bank/IMF, the most authoritative voice in matters of this nature, has already told us in clear terms that India has happily yielded its place to Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world. It is not an achievement we should be proud of – unless, of course you are a politician.

Make no mistake. Our leaders at all levels are fighting this scourge. They have for all of eternity. President Obasanjo came up with two programmes: to reduce poverty, called poverty reduction programme; and then to alleviate it called poverty alleviation programme. Poverty was neither reduced nor alleviated. The truth is that we fight poverty by not fighting it. We cannot waste and want and expect poverty not to look at our gallant efforts with a smirk on its face. I will show shortly that this has been the pattern of our development efforts for so long it has become our development culture.

From my limited understanding of economics, unemployment is a familiar face of poverty. If you open up employment opportunities to ten people, you take more than ten people off the streets. If you have ten pairs of feet fewer pounding our pavements, you save the cost of their poor maintenance. But see what we have done with some major industrial development projects that could have made all the difference to the grinding poverty that, despite the millions the politicians spent these past few weeks to win party primaries, is not the accepted fact of our national life.

First, I take the steel industry conceived in the seventies based on the industrial development wisdom that no country could make a meaningful progress in its industrialisation programme without steel. Ajaokuta is perhaps the best known of these efforts. I have heard unconfirmed reports that we have so far sunk $6.4 billion into it. When the Russians were here, Ajaokuta was an impressive little town. I do not know how many people it employed then but I am willing to bet that it could not have been turned into a booming little town without human beings.

Then the Russians left and the Indians came. They are usually the under takers in matters of this nature. Today, Ajaokuta, stripped and abandoned, is a most sorry sight, a crying monument to a nation that enjoys the leisure of catching at a straw and telling the world it is floating. And so the iron deposits at Itakpe, the main raw materials for Ajaokuta, remain where nature stored them. We continue to import steel in all shapes and sizes for our industries. I wonder if there is some evidence in history that nations industrialised by sabotaging its own efforts and investments.

Because of Ajaokuta, we had the Delta Steel plant at Aladja, in Warri. An impressive little town grew up around it too. Who is talking of that factory today? It is dead. I do not know how much was sunk into it but I am willing to bet we spent much more than some careless pennies. Think of the factory humming and think of the many young engineers it could have taken off the unemployment queue directly and indirectly.

Because of Aladja, we had steel rolling mills at Oshogbo, Jos and Katsina. Because Ajaokuta failed, Aladja too failed. And because the two failed all the capital-intensive steel rolling mills with great potentials for massive employments with multiplier effects also failed, dragging down our hopes and our future with them. While they lasted, they made a difference to the immediate communities. And when they ceased to be, they took something vital away from the communities too. How much went down the drain on these steel mills?

There is no magic in tackling poverty. You do not reduce or alleviate it by paying a pittance to some people in some communities. You do so by embarking on capital development projects. Here is my second example of industries that could have made India retain its unenviable position as the poverty capital of the world. The paper mills. Oku-Iboku in Akwa Ibom State was a sensible response to the newsprint needs in our country. Where is it now, the company that for many years managed to locally produce newsprint for the print media industry in the country? The last time I looked, it was there, covered with dust. Because it ceased to exist we went back to importing newsprint with dire consequences on the fortunes of our print media. How much did we waste here?

Then take Iwopin in Ogun State. This massive investment was intended to produce raw materials for Oku-Iboku. It never came on stream. At the time it was abandoned, it was 95 per completed. The will to commit the needed five per cent to get into production could not be found in successive federal governments. The factory has been perfectly vandalised. Should anyone summon the will to revive it now, he would be spending more than ten times its original cost. How much did we sink in here by the way?

These are all federal government. This is the government in the driving seat of our social, industrial and economic development. Perhaps, these abandoned capital development projects are not the worst cases in the country. Perhaps, there are even bigger industrial and capital development projects that similarly raised our hopes and dashed them. I have cited them to show that no serious country anywhere in the world would treat itself this way and expect to catch up with the rest of the developing countries. It is difficult, impossible even, for a country that opens and shuts the doors of development and employment opportunities in the face of potential employees as ours has done all these years to make any valid claims on a) tackling unemployment and b) taking on poverty, either to reduce it or alleviate it.

This lucky country has never lacked one thing critical to all modern nations: great ideas. If you look around, you would see evidence of good ideas put to the test but, given something called the Nigerian factor, became curses, not blessings. The Defence Industries Corporation, Kaduna, was a good idea. Brazil had the same idea about the same time. But while ours was at one stage reduced to furniture-making, its Brazilian counterpart now fully manufactures civilian and military aircraft and motor vehicles. And without shame, we are among the consumers of the products of that industry.

We cynically attribute our failures to something called the Nigerian factor. I still do not know what it is or how it operates. But I know that as long as we waste and we want, we can only hack at the granite of poverty with a tea spoon. And no shaking. I know that as long as we spend more on elective offices than investing in the human capital, so long would we watch other nations grow and watch our own growth get progressively stunted.

The solution is simple. We must get back to the basics of development. We have wasted enough. Nothing would change if we continue along the path that has taken us nowhere. I can see that it is the path we are most comfortable with. But let no one pretend not see the graph of unemployment figures and poverty on a permanent stiff climb. Still, let us hail Nigeria, our own dear giant cursed with Lilliputian strides.

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