Seun Onigbinde: Social investment programmes not solution to poverty

Seun Onigbinde, director and co-founder of BudgIT, says the social investment programmes of the federal government are not a “ticket out of poverty“.

Onigbinde spoke on Friday during an interview on Channels Television.

On Thursday, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), in its latest national multidimensional poverty index report, said 133 million Nigerians are multidimensionally poor.

According to the report, 65 percent of poor people in the country live in the northern part of the country, while nearly 47 million live in the south.

Over the past years, the federal government under President Muhammadu Buhari has initiated social investment programmes, which include cash transfer, school feeding scheme, and TraderMoni, as part of efforts to tackle poverty.

Speaking during the interview, Onigbinde said social investment programmes cannot solely address the problem of poverty in the country.

“There are two problems. One, I have not seen a coherent evaluation or assessment of those plans (referring to social investment programmes),” he said.

“That is a problem. It is a bit shocking. If you look at the 2023 budget, around N350 billion, almost the same size with capital investments on roads, is what we are investing in social investment under the humanitarian ministry.

“That ministry did not even exist five or six years ago. My own big idea is that if you are putting N350 billion in a programme or even up to N500 billion in some instances, by the time you put the recurrent side to it, what is the impact you are getting from it?

“We are not even assessing the programmes as we should. It is just typical of Nigeria — spend the money — and nobody is given the rigour on the impact of the money.

“Second, that is not a ticket out of poverty. Most of these things are add-on. The fundamental way of getting people out of poverty is to give them dignity by making sure there is productivity in the economy and people have jobs.

“Without not being able to tackle that from the basic standard, whatever we are doing is add-on and we will not change the metrics significantly.”