Nigeria: The Poverty Time Bomb

Daily Champion

20 January 2011

Nigeria: The Poverty Time Bomb

For a country blessed with so much natural endowments, the recent disclosure, that about 105 million Nigerians, or 70 percent of the population, are living below the poverty line, is both shameful and heartbreaking.

The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who made the statement in Abuja at the Fifth Annual Micro-Finance and Micro-Entrepreneurship Awards, blamed the situation partly on lack of access to financial services, poor infrastructure, low income and social exclusion. He correctly pointed out that the situation is "unacceptable."

Even without the benefit of statistics, what we can see on the streets today suggests that a higher percentage of Nigerians are, indeed, living below the poverty line.