The Head Corner Stone: Human Centred Policies as Panacea to Poverty in Nigeria

Abstract

Introduction Nigeria made several policies towards growth, development, and poverty reduction with little or no success. Some of these policies were developed with the help of stakeholders, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). These policies include the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and now, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Using the poverty growth curve, Ichoku, Agu, and Ataguba (2012) shows that poverty continues to grow in Nigeria despite the country's claim of economic growth. Despite the so-called economic growth, unemployment keeps on rising, poverty rate becomes higher, and industries close down. One therefore wonders whether the Nigerian economy is really serving the society, or are the assessors of the economic performance of the country measuring the wrong thing. This paper submits that these policies do not serve the need of their designers and implementers because the initial conception was without much input from the people most affected by poverty. This paper, therefore, explores the essential things that matter most in the lives of the people as measures of development and calls for a shift from measuring economic production (GDP) or per capita income (GNI) to measuring people's well-being in the context of environmental and sustainability conditions (Stigliz, Sen, & Fitoussi, 2010). As considered in this paper, well-being includes at least three elements: poverty, social exclusion, and vulnerability. This paper concentrates on poverty and proposes pro-poor antipoverty policies to reduce poverty, emphasis on the measure people's well-being, and, therefore, shift the focus of poverty reduction strategy to improving people's quality of life. Changing emphasis to measures of quality of life means working towards the development of a statistical system that will measure how adequate the economy captures people's well-being. This paper proposes some new ideas on the assessment of development and poverty reduction in Nigeria. With insufficient resources to fight poverty, the approach in this paper is to identify poverty factors and the web of relationships they formed. It is then possible to identify those factors that are centrally connected, rank them according to their impact to poverty, and develop policies to tackle them, thereby breaking or weakening the web. As proposed by ul Haq (1995) based on Sen (1987) theoretical exposition, the ideas of development should be people-centred. This paper uses Human Development Index (HDI) promoted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to measure people-centred development. HDI have been used over time to rank countries in terms of human development since 1990 (UNDP, 1990). Nigeria has been lowly ranked on HDI scale over the years despite several