To think about social problems in Nigeria will be akin to being thrown into the deep of the Bar Beach with your hands and legs tied - You will be fired by adrenaline into a state of mental struggle, you will gasp for air of elusive hope but slowly you will resign, overwhelmed by the state of things and finally, you will give in to the thick darkness of doom hanging over your head.
The social problems in Nigeria are myriad with several tangential symptoms breaking through the news every day. From socio-political crisis including the recent massacre in Jos and protracted saga in the Niger Delta to the rise in incidence of kidnapping and several other social ills, these issues are growing in monstrous proportion.
What are the fundamental causes of these problems?
Patricia Justino showed us a possible answer in her work on links between conflict and chronic poverty that social discontent and frustration with living conditions can act as triggers of conflict. In the same light, Ted Gurr also made a critical point:
"Primary causal sequence in political violence is first the development of discontent, second the politicization of the discontent, and finally its actualization in violent action against political objects and actors. Discontent arising from the perception of relative deprivation is the basic, instigating condition for participants in collective violence"
To buttress Ted Gurr's point, Easterly and Levine said that this social discontent "can be a powerful mechanism when forms of discontent coincide with ethnic, religious or regional divides measured by the degree of ethnic fragmentation"
We can safely conclude that these problems are rooted in unemployment and poverty amongst other things. Poverty can best be understood in the words of 1980 Brandt Commission Report:
"… millions of people in the poorer countries are preoccupied solely with survival and elementary needs. For them work is frequently not available or, when it is, pay is low and conditions often barely tolerable. Homes are constructed of impermanent materials and have neither piped water nor sanitation. Electricity is a luxury. Health services are thinly spread and in rural areas only rarely within walking distance. Primary schools, where they exist, may be free and not too far away, but children are needed for work and cannot be easily spared for schooling. Permanent insecurity is the condition of the poor. There are no public systems of social security in the event of unemployment, sickness or death of a wage earner in the family. Flood, drought or disease affecting people or livestock can destroy livelihoods without hope of compensation. The poorest of the poor . . . will remain . . . outside the reach of normal trade and communication. The combination of malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, high birth rates, underemployment and low income closes off the avenues of escape."
Conservatively, 20% of Nigerians of who can work and want to work to provide for themselves and their families cannot find work. The proportion of Nigerians living in poverty which reduced from 66% to 54% between 1996 and 2004 actually increased in absolute figures from 67 million people to about 69 million people. What this means is that for every one reading this that is living above the poverty line, there is another person living below the poverty line. For every two people you meet everyday, who can comfortably afford three square meals, there are two other people somewhere else in Nigeria who can hardly afford one.
Though the figure varies from different sources and the data and statistics are arguable, it has been shown that about 80% or more of Nigerians are living on less than about 300 naira per day and about 50% are living less than 150 naira per day day i.e about 50% of Nigerians can barely afford to take a bottle of Pet Coke (N100) and Gala Sausage (N50) per day.
The truth is that majority of Nigerians are trapped in existential level, seeking to meet their physiological and safety needs.
This is a great and daunting challenge that cannot be left for government alone to resolve. Several multinationals, global NGOs and international social entrepreneurs have decided tackle the issues head on and are investing and working assiduously to set the world's bottom of the pyramid (BOP) free from the shackles of poverty, but there effort however genuine and impactful cannot completely solve these problems. The best answers and greatest solution lies in our hands as Nigerians and Africans. It is social innovation and entrepreneurship.
We need to begin to channel our energy and creativity as Nigerians to solving our unique problems in way that is pragmatic to us. For example, Grameen Bank is solving poverty problem in Bangladesh – it was conceived in Bangladesh by a Mohammed Yunus a Bangladeshi. Mpesa, a mobile banking service in Kenya, is solving banking problems in Kenya and farmers are given access to innovative banking services.
The journey of social innovation has begun in Nigeria, albeit in slow and tottering steps. We have examples like the Paradigm Initiative Nigeria (PIN) which is focused on leveraging information and communication and technology to create opportunity for young people in Nigeria and Social Innovation Camp, an initiative which connects ideas with funding and support. However, we need to expand our scope to areas of primary needs of our people covering food, clothes, shelter and unemployment or in the reverse, create employment and people will be able to provide food, clothes and shelters for themselves and their families.
So I believe our social innovation and entrepreneurship should be focused on directly creating employment or enabling other enterprises create employment. We should move out mindsets away from setting up NGO-like enterprises to creating start-ups and companies which will make profits while driving out poverty from Nigeria.
As the wave of social advocacy spreads across Nigeria on the back of social networking platforms and more social advocates emerges to break the back of injustice and inequality, we must not lose sight of the fact that we also need social innovators and entrepreneurs to break the back of poverty. We need to tap into the passion of the new generation Nigerians to spread the fire of innovation and entrepreneurship.
On a final thought, I am not hopeless about Nigeria. I believe that the crop of new generation Nigerians can lead the nation out of the quagmire of socio-economic and political problems. I believe in the emergence of social innovators and entrepreneurs in a critical mass adequate to change the state of things in Nigeria. I believe in Nigeria.
