by Demola Rewaju

Absolute poverty is not in Lagos however – at least, not on the level of those truly poor people in some states of this country where it walks on two legs. They’re the ones who would scramble to snatch your food wrapping if you so much as pick up the hand-washing bowl to wet your fingers with water in Jebba. They’ll be on your half-finished meal so fast you’ll be scared to drag it with them. 

I had an epiphany sometime during the fuel subsidy crisis in 2012 – the poorest people in this country have no benefit from the subsidy of fuel products which is why I controversially supported the subsidy removal move and made public my support for it in principle with this article from this blog. You see the truly poor do not have any kind of motorised vehicles needing petrol, neither do they use generators – ‘I beta pass my neighbour’ is not even their aim because they’re not connected to the national electricity grid – a reality for over 65% of our 160 million people in Nigeria. These people live in the creeks of the Niger-Delta, some place across the Middle-Belt, a few Yoruba and Igbo hinterlands but primarily in the North-East and North-West geopolitical zones. Jigawa was once declared the poorest state in Nigeria by the World Bank and is constantly among the five least receiving states from the federal allocation which is why in this other article I suggested a centrist approach to the federal revenue allocation.

There is another set of people who are the ones we see everyday in Lagos, Abuja, Port-Harcourt and other urban cities but they are so much better off than some that they cannot truly be called ‘poor’. They have a defined hustle – no matter how low-paying it might be. They sleep under bridges and at bus stops truly but they find a way to eat, recharge their mobile phones when necessary and even find cheap sex in parked buses in the garage late at night. Their poverty is relative to the ‘wealth’ around them.

Absolute poverty is not in Lagos however – at least, not on the level of those truly poor people in some states of this country where it walks on two legs. They’re the ones who would scramble to snatch your food wrapping if you so much as pick up the hand-washing bowl to wet your fingers with water in Jebba. They’ll be on your half-finished meal so fast you’ll be scared to drag it with them. They lick the soup bowl clean and eat the sticky bits of pasty meals on the nylon wrapper. They sleep in the open and drink waters that are dirtier than the ones some of us bathe with here. They rarely bathe and the piece of soap you throw away is a luxury they can scarcely afford. They marry their little daughters off, not because they are wicked but because the bride price income is one that can help them get by for a few months and they’ve looked forward to it ever since the poor girl was born.

They are exposed to terrible diseases because of their unhygienic conditions and they die of earlier than the rest of us – another reason to marry off their daughters earlier so that by 50 years of age, one may well be a great-grandmother before death comes. When they die, they hardly spend hours in mourning – partly out of religious restrictions but mainly because death is not unexpected even though it is unexplainable since they do not know the cause. They do not look for fancy coffins and cannot afford burial spaces – the state provides that for them.

When you see them begging for alms in Lagos or sleeping in the open as maiguards or night-watchmen, feel sorry for them but much more for their peers back in the arid villages – these ones have hope because they can see that a better life is attainable. A move from maiguard to okada rider or suya seller is a promotion. From there to bureau de change is a bigger step-up.

The poor are those who have no hope at all – no hope of an education or even electricity which many of us prefer to make huge noises about. The poor are too poor to dream of a better life because you can only dream of what you’ve seen or imagined. Can I borrow a Dollar? Is the title of an article I wrote about poverty in Nigeria two years ago then wrote about the solution to poverty in Nigeria in this second part. The first article explains the difference between relative and absolute poverty. I also wrote about the duty of government to the poor in this article about The Poor Folks. The subject of poverty and wealth in a society like ours is one that really bothers me but I know the solution will not come entirely from government. A reading of the linked articles in this piece will deepen the conversation on this subject as will the concluding part of this piece tomorrow.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.