Unemployment, poverty and violence: The triple connection

Uche Igwe
| credits: File copy

During a recent visit to Nigeria, I met a friend and proposed a programme which I thought would reduce electoral violence in his state. After listening to my presentation for about 20 minutes, he took me through his own views about how he felt the problems of poverty and rising unemployment were contributing to and probably exacerbating the  rising violence and insecurity in our society. For him, ‘These young people are resorting to self-help in a country that has refused to carter for them. Therefore, no matter how you preach peace in the forthcoming elections, as far as you do not make concrete interventions that will get the youth gainfully employed, the efforts will amount to nothing.” The logic of his explanation was so convincing that I had to agree with my team to review the thrust of our proposal.

On that same trip, a friend of mine who was recently released from the kidnappers’ den narrated to me how the head of the gang freely used his latest MAC computer. I consider myself very exposed technologically but I cannot easily operate a MAC computer. You can only imagine the level of technological sophistication such a gang leader must have attained. After a university education probably, he is now comfortable doing this high-risk criminality. That is what many of our graduates have turned to and it is so sad to contemplate.

The forthcoming elections in 2015 will be violent regardless of the outcome. I can tell you that for free. The reason is not necessarily about the Peoples Democratic Party or the All Progressives Congress. It is not necessarily about President Goodluck Jonathan or those who are working to challenge him, though that is part of it. It is about the rising temperature of the polity due to dire developmental indices and failed policies. The reasons are what I call the 3Ps or the triple connection – Population, Poverty and Proliferation – of small arms and light weapons.

Let us look at the first P. The issue of population. That the number of people in Nigeria is increasing rapidly is not in contention. What is clearly in contention is what that number is. Worryingly, no one knows what that number is. Not even the government at whatever level in the country. It can be different at different times depending on what you need the figures for. Corruption has robbed us of almost everything including the sanity of being able to produce the right statistics. So, we can only guess and speculate. And so the guess is that out of the population, there are relatively many young people. That should have been a strength at least judging from other countries that now complain of an aging population, but that is not the case in Nigeria. So, the country cannot even plan because the data are either unavailable or because of questionable integrity. We may end up depending on such outcomes like the turnout in the last Nigeria Immigration Service recruitment that turned tragic. Those young men and women (especially men) who continue not to have jobs will easily be recruited as thugs during elections to snatch ballot boxes, wreak havoc, and spread violence.

The second P is poverty. The level of the poverty in Nigeria is increasing hopelessness and desperation. No matter how you measure it, whether you use the proportion of those who live on less than one dollar a day or the amount of people who are scavenging around refuse dumps, the increasing poverty in Nigeria is there for everyone to see. And if you doubt me, visit any of these politicians and see the swarms of visitors waiting for them. In the absence of any form of social safety net, these citizens turn to politicians who plunder public resources and hand over little hand-outs to the real owners of the resources as if they are doing them a favour. In exchange for these favours, they demand votes. By doing this, they weaken the capacity of the poor people to check them through their votes. With very few options left, when the electoral outcome turns against their wishes, they resort to violence as an alternative way to express their helplessness.

The third P is the proliferation of small arms and light weapons. You can take this to the bank, the amount of weapons that have been stockpiled in our communities are not only enormous, they are unprecedented. The young people are “ready” and equipped with the right tools waiting to be used. If you look at the cost of these weapons and the amount of poverty in the communities, you cannot but conclude that these weapons with potential for mass destruction have been procured by the same politicians for the youth to kill themselves and others. These same politicians who have failed to provide them jobs or other forms of positive empowerment. The theme of manipulation may be either ethnic or religious but the fact remains that the core issue lies in the furtherance of the interest of the elite. No matter how many young people are felled by these weapons, it is for the political elite to profit from it.

Another interesting explanation comes from the issue of class differentiation and wealth distribution. Nigerian politics is famous for sharing  or its distributive orientation. Politicians display stupendous wealth ostentatiously while a majority of citizens remain poor. If you go to the domestic wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, you will see how many private jets are parked there daily. Some of these jets are allegedly maintained with public resources running into billions of naira. Imagine that a serving minister is said to have spent N3.120bn only on chartering planes for herself and her family at the expense of the public. Gosh!  Embezzlement of public funds has become a daily news. These young people are not only angry but frustrated and so have resorted to ways of helping themselves to get a little share of the cake. They do so by helping themselves with an AK-47 and targeting those who they believe are sharing the cake to take a share. It does not really matter who is their victim. It does not even matter their approach. Whether armed robbery or kidnapping or political assassination or thuggery, they have to find a way to express themselves and take their own share of our national patrimony. The resultant situation is chaos and pandemonium. In such a situation, anybody can be caught in the crossfire. Many that we originally thought would never be affected because of the fortress they had built around themselves have turned out to be victims of the same system that they helped to create. The political elite must therefore realise that this segment of the population must be taken care of for them to sit and enjoy their loot with a peace of mind. The country is sitting on a keg of gunpowder and when it explodes, no one will escape the repercussions. They must therefore unite and do something urgently, not because they should, but because they must. A combination of huge population, unemployment and poverty has a mutually assured destructive capacity for the nation.