POVERTY:OUR NEW NAME?

The just concluded yearly summit of the United Nations General Assembly saw Ban Ki Moon, the Secretary General submitting a report which lamented the worsening global poverty, stating that the near poor are becoming poorer.”
In the report which Ban Ki Moon titled as “voiles of the vulnerable; the economic crisis from the ground up revealed,” that Nigeria and other sub-Sahara African countries, have the highest percentage of their populations descending in poverty line.
The most surprising part of this report of the United Nations Secretary General is the inclusion of Nigeria as a country which has a high percentage of it’s population as poor.
The report is quite shocking especially in reference to Nigeria with it’s huge God-given natural resources that abounds in every nook and cranny of the nation.
For Nigeria to be consistently mentioned at global rating as one of the countries in which it’s citizens go to bed hungry is to me an anathema, when at the same we are being mentioned as a nation with one of the highest deposit of crude oil.
Though this is not the first time such bad report is coming about Nigeria. But this is quite shocking after all the efforts (which are quite pseudo) which past and present governments have put to fight poverty in the country. If one decides to name all the programmes and policies which have been initiated in the country to fight poverty by deferent regimes this page of the newspaper will not contain them. But what can we take from them as benefits when the UN report says those that were “Near poor” before are now poor while the poorer before are descending lower and lower down in the scale of poverty line?
In this same obscure situation in Nigeria a select few has become millionaires overnight just because they have access to the nation’s treasury as citizens of the nation are wallowing in poverty and penury.
Though when this report was given President Yar’adua was not present, but I belief by now he must have been briefed by his Foreign Affairs Minister on the outcome of the summit, why is it that he has remained silent over the matter when other good countries whose names where mentioned as poor are doing everything within their power to reverse the trend.
The president and other relevant agencies in charge of solving this problem are remaining mute, thinking that the problem will fix itself up. How can it be solved when government officials shun all coincidental and moral issues while swallowing huge sums of money meant for poverty alleviation programmes. How can it end, when some officials of the government without any sense of decency diverts loans meant for the poor to their personal account? How can it end, when the poor who are supposed to challenge these cabal of leaders to put an end to this shameful situation, are the ones singing their praises after a meager coin have been slipped on their fingers for daily and installment survival.
Poverty is the shirt you wear, sometimes unknowingly. A millionaire surrounded by thousands of poverty-stricken neighbours is poor by all standard because if I may ask, how will the millionaires relate these neighbours? I will leave that for you to answer.