State Governors Are To Blame For Rising Poverty, Says FG

The federal government has blamed the state governments for the country’s rising poverty level.
According to Track News, Clement Agba, Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, made this claim in Abuja on Wednesday following the week’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa.

According to him, the rise in poverty in the country is the result of state governments failing to contribute their fair share of development responsibilities to the grassroots, where the majority of production activities take place.

While fielding questions from State House Correspondents on how he and his counterpart, Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, were doing to alleviate the current hardship faced by Nigerians, Agba noted that state governors are busy building flyovers, airports, and other visible projects in state capitals rather than investing in areas that directly improve the standard of living of people in rural areas.

He argued that state governments have consistently received their fair share of national resources, but have misdirected them to projects that have little direct impact on people’s needs.

According to Track News, several reactions have followed the recent report released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) last week that 63% of Nigerians, or 133 million people, are multidimensionally poor.

According to the NBS report, 65% of the poor live in the north, while 35% live in the south.

However, the minister’s reaction joins a slew of others when he says that approximately 72% of poverty in Nigeria is found in rural areas, and state governors have abandoned this rural population to focus on functions in state capitals.

Agba also stated that while states control agricultural land, they do not invest in it to achieve the desired effect on their rural citizens, noting that they should focus on initiatives that can lift the majority of people out of poverty.

He also stated that the Federal Government has been allocating resources to alleviate public hardship through many of its social security programs.