I listened to my friend, Bongo Adi, a professor of economics at Pan Atlantic University, at the public presentation of a book, titled “Media and Poverty Reduction in Nigeria: Communication, Development and Policy Options”, by yet another friend of mine, Dr. Victor Ikem, and my view on the poverty eradication programmes of successive Nigerian governments radically changed.
Professor Adi had stood in for Pat Utomi, the professor of political economy, who, unavoidably, was unable to make the event that was held at the Nigerian Institute for International Affairs, Victoria Island, Lagos.
The event was a twin, public lecture, book presentation showcase that had Adi speak on the topic, “Pathways for Inclusive Development: Rethinking Communication Policy and Partnership”, and the take out from the professor’s lecture was that rather than eradicate poverty, the Nigerian government has over the years, reinforced the obnoxious social state through the emphasis on tokenism and dependency mindsets.
Adi stated that when the rich think about the poor, they make poor thinking. And no one can take a long look down the chequered road of Nigeria’s history, starting from the days of the Better Life for Rural Women programme of the late Mrs. Maryam Babangida, up to the present multifarious initiatives of the current administration, for measurable leaps from poverty into something more sustainable.
The discovery would be sprawling – nothing. Poverty has consistently been glamourized and elevated into an industry for the political class. From the national level, this industry has been romanticised by the different cadres of government, federal, state, and local government. The growth of sustainability and corporate social responsibility has further developed this industry as corporations now decorate poverty and invest heavily in advertising it for business capital.
These days, the government has given a ridiculous name to what is the serenading of poverty, calling it “palliative”, and strangely, many citizens believe that handouts from the government and highly placed people have the capacity to lift them from poverty. Late in 2023, a few months into the life of the Tinubu administration, it donated N5 billion to each of the state governments for distribution to the citizens as palliatives to cushion the effects of the removal of fuel subsidy on the people. Most citizens didn’t get any of the material and food items distributed, and ever since then, there have been other rounds of sharing of palliatives cloaked as poverty relief materials.
Referencing old social philosophers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Francis Fanon, Adi introduced what he called, the “business of poverty” to illustrate how poverty has come to feed an industry. Adi described the “Business of Poverty” as “as a field of symbolic struggle where economic capital intersects with cultural and social capitals to reproduce structures of domination.”
Professor Adi explained that Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of position illuminate how poverty is not “merely an economic condition but a performative arena in which dominant actors — such as multinational corporations, NGOs, and media conglomerates — deploy narratives of deprivation to legitimise interventions that ultimately reinforce class hierarchies.”
He wrote: “For instance, poverty alleviation campaigns often communicate “success stories” that mask the underlying doxa of neoliberal exploitation, perpetuating symbolic violence by framing the poor as passive recipients rather than agents of change. Complementing this, Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial critique in works like ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ exposes the business of poverty as an extension of colonial Manichaeism, where the communication of poverty serves to dehumanize the colonised subject, transforming systemic impoverishment into a marketable spectacle. Fanon would argue that such communications — through aid advertisements or corporate social responsibility reports — replicate the psychological alienation of the oppressed, positioning poverty as a “business opportunity” that sustains neocolonial dependencies, thereby hindering genuine decolonisation and self-determination.”
The truth nobody wants to address is that nobody in Nigeria has ever been lifted out of poverty through gifts and tokens, or what they choose to call government palliatives. Sustainable poverty eradication has to be locked in the economic sprocket of value engineering, without which nothing is created for anybody. Any person or group that is poor, who is not in the value engineering wheel is not likely to have his or her circumstances changed, no matter how much freebies are made available.
Nigerians have, over the years, been treated with the ridiculous spectacles where political leaders distribute amenities such as sewing machines, grinding machines, hairdressing devices, wheelbarrows, shovels, and other strange items as poverty alleviation projects. Somewhere in the north of Nigeria, a National Assembly member was reported to have donated the material for Muslim burial of his constituents.
In presenting alternatives to the practice of communicating poverty, the professor dismissed the widely celebrated Grameen Bank model which originated in Bangladesh and earned its founder, Mohammed Yunus, a Nobel Prize, as not transformative enough.
Grameen Bank was founded in Bangladesh in 1976 as an action research pilot project in “Jobra” village in Chattogram district of Bangladesh after a famine had hit a section of the country in 1974. In 1983, the pilot project was transformed into a bank with the aim of alleviating poverty and empowering the marginalised poor in Bangladesh through micro-credit.
But this model, according to Adi, is not transformative enough to ignite quantum economic growth and poverty eradication. He rather favours the South Korean and Japanese models of Chaebols and Keiretsu, models which have proven industrial-scale national transformation.
The closest to this model in Nigeria was the ill-fated Transnational Corporation of Nigeria, which Olusegun Obasanjo floated during his term as Nigeria’s President, between 1999 and 2007.
The Korean Chaebol system thrived through the development of a handful of industrial behemoths, which feed off every other industry in a bottom-up industry-with-industry connection that ensures seamless flow of economic value. The connection ensures that the rest of the economy works to feed the bigger industries above them, and up it goes until the big manufacturers are provided with the components they need to produce the things they mostly export.
History says the Koreans assimilated the Chaebol system during a period when the Japanese colonised South Korea and introduced their own Keiretsu system. It was the Keiretsu that produced the Toyotas, Hondas, Mitsubishis, and other world-renowned Japanese automobile manufacturing giants, which are now all global brands.
Most Japanese homes are mini-factories where families produce stuff used by bigger industries, and those small units feed relatively bigger industries and up it scales until the needs of the big corporations are met.
This way, everybody produces what the industry needs and the value trickles down to the lowest person in the order of value.
What Professor Adi did not put in words is that what Nigeria needs is not the distribution of tokens and the democratization of political zakat. His thesis is that Nigeria needs a lot more Dangotes across industries. These Dangotes would provide real jobs to dependent industries and people.
Poverty alleviation is a colonial legacy that reinforces. It reinforces the cycle of dependency and emphasizes the gaps between the political class and the people. Because the political class celebrates it, business, in the name of CSR, has been squeezing it much the same way they squeeze capital, glamourizing it on glossy surfaces and making shows of interventions that don’t move the needle of wellbeing forward.
