Giving Nigeria’s huge natural resource base for which it
earned over US $ 300 billion (From crude oil alone) in
the last three decades, as well as the promising options
available in agriculture and solid minerals, Nigeria indeed
should have no business with being poor. Moreso, its 148
million people (47% of the West-African Sub-Region’
Population) are known to be very hardworking, innovative
and resilient. All major economic and social indicators
however paint Nigeria in the picture of one of the world’s
greatest paradoxes – unimaginable poverty amidst so
much. Nigeria is today embarrassingly considered the
25 poorest nations on earth with 70% of its population
(As against 15% in 1960), classified as poor and 54.4%
vegetating below the bread line of a dollar per day. Life
expectancy is barely 50 years (Below those of Egypt,
Ghana, Kenya and South-Africa). The government
(Federal, State and Local) in the last three decades has
reeled out a plethora of policies and programmes aimed
at consigning poverty (at least in its alarming dimensions)
to history. Though systematic and comprehensive impact
evaluation of these efforts is not available, the worsened
poverty incidence, depth and severity are evidence that
the policies failed. Using secondary data from dependable
sources, this paper employs a desk analysis to show
that a great deal of poverty policies and programmes
in Nigeria tend to undermine the critical input of its
primary beneficiaries or targets at the policy formulation
and implementation stages, and so they continue to fail.