About two persons be
come poorer every minute in Nigeria, says an economic expert and Dean of Port Harcourt Business School, Prof Okey Onachukwu.
Prof. Onachukwu, who featured in a phone-in programme organised by Silverbird Communications in Port Harcourt, last Saturday, said the current harsh economic climate is an affirmation of statistics released by World Poverty Club that Nigeria has overtaken India as the capital of poverty worldwide.
Though the federal government had last in two weeks dismissed the report by the World Poverty Club as a “mere fantasy”, Prof. Onachukwu, however said the reality on ground affirms that Nigerian economy is already in doldrums.
The University don said the current economic indices paint the country in bad light insisting that, “as far as education and employment creation are below the stipulated standard, poverty will increase”.
He stated that: “you just don’t sit at a place and plan projects for the people, the community and the people must have input”.
Onachukwu while condemning the current policies and programmes of the federal government said most of the policies are “spoon fed” to the citizenry, such he said cannot provide the needed momentum to drive development.
“There must be articulation of the peoples problems from a bottom-up approach”, the professor of economics”, averred.
He tasked the federal lawmakers to live up to their responsibilities by coming home to confer with their constituents, explaining that it’s by knowing the challenge at the grassroots, that the government can articulate effective policies and programmes.
On how to pull the country out of its current economic malaise Onuchukwu recommended: “we can only recover to make people get out of the poverty line by ensuring that at least two persons every second get out of poverty”.