N5bn Palliative Not the Solution to Poverty, NLC Points Out

According to Joe Ajero, president of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) When distributed among the more than 133 million multifacetedly impoverished Nigerians, the N5 billion palliative package announced by the federal government won’t equal N1500 per person.

Ajero stated this on Friday during an interview with the Politics Today program on Channels Television. Citing data from the National Bureau of Statistics, he claimed that N185 billion could not possibly make a difference for the 133 million multifacetedly impoverished Nigerians.

The head of the labor union insisted that even if the money were equivalent to six trailers of rice, it wouldn’t be enough to buy each person one cup of rice.

He continued by saying that more Nigerians had crossed the line into extreme poverty between the first and most recent increases in the price of gasoline at the pump.

 “Let us assume that it is a palliative and not a loan, you will agree that it is difficult to feel the impact of such an amount at a time like this when the Bureau of Statistics has come up to say that over 133 million Nigerians are multi-dimensionally poor.

“You start to wonder about the impact of N185bn to 133 million people by their admittance, who are multi-dimensionally poor.

“In fact from the first increase in pump price of petrol and the last one, a lot of people moved from the borderline to a very high level of poverty. If you calculate and do an arithmetic on that, you will discover that it won’t amount to N1500 per person and you ask if that’s the impact that we want to achieve,” he said.