Yes, the three go together, and this weekend has demonstrated that. Any casual observer of the Nigerian situation, including the World Bank that provided the funding, knows that the Nigerian government does not have the data of the most vulnerable people in Nigeria. The federal government started this under President Buhari. It has now come to light that it was a conduit for corruption. There is no evidence that all the distributions under Trader Moni and conditional cash transfers were backed with data. Surprisingly, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu continued with the policy. The other point is that no poor country can share itself out of poverty. In a poor country, poverty alleviation means more poverty, and not less, because we are sharing from a little and reducing pie. Nigeria, with the largest number of poor people one earth does not need conditional cash transfers but jobs for income growth across all levels. Now, it is very clear that the absence of data of poor people have led to billions of Naira finding their way into private accounts. Those ones have simply solved their “poverty” problems. You cannot legislate people out of poverty, and you cannot share out of poverty. The government knows this, and these schemes have always been about corruption.
