For Haruna Idris, a 21-year-old man who fled the Islamist insurgency in Nigeria’s northeast for the relative safety of the capital, Abuja, the only way to make a living is to sell on the streets.
Yet, while hawking windscreen wipers on the highways around Abuja’s Area One district, he’s keenly aware of the essence of maintaining vigilance for the sudden appearance of officials of the Abuja Environmental Protection Board’s task force.
Comprising policemen, members of the civil defence force and others who bear the appearance of thugs, their modus operandi is to swoop on hawkers, destroy their wares, beat and haul those they can grab into detention.
“It’s our daily reality and we’re always on the lookout and ready to flee once the task force people appear,” Idris said in a recent interview. “But we’re not always lucky.”
The fundamental rights provisions of the Nigerian Constitution provides for the right to life, the right to the dignity of the human person and the right to personal liberty among several other provisions. They’re often obeyed in breach rather than affirmation, especially for the poor. While in principle the law is no respecter of persons, in Nigeria empirical evidence has shown the rich get more dignified treatment than those obviously poor.
“For those living in poverty, many human rights are out of reach,” says the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Among many other deprivations, they often lack access to education, health services, safe drinking water and basic sanitation. They are often excluded from participating meaningfully in the political process and prevented from seeking justice for violations of their human rights.”
Out of Nigeria’s current population of about 200 million people, almost half (about 90 million people) are estimated to live in extreme poverty. The World Bank defines them as those surviving with less than two dollars daily.
However, the UNHCR points out that there are many dimensions of extreme poverty that go far beyond not having adequate income. Approaches to defining poverty relying only on income fail to capture the “wide-ranging” nature of the privations that go with it.
The United Nations Development Programme’s Multidimensional Poverty Index of 2019 said more than 1.3 billion people are living in multidimensional poverty globally, often making them victims of a double jeopardy.
“Extreme poverty can be a cause of specific human rights violations, for instance, because the poor are forced to work in environments that are unsafe and unhealthy,” says the UNHCR. “At the same time, poverty can also be a consequence of human rights violations, for instance, when children are unable to escape poverty because the State does not provide adequate access to education.”
In many ways the above characterization defines the situation in Nigeria and the experience of the likes of Idris on the streets of Abuja. Nigeria is estimated to have anything between 15-20 million out-of-school children roaming the streets. Economic and social rights are, so far, not guaranteed by Nigerian laws, a fact borne out by statistics that indicate poverty levels of between 70 percent and 90 percent in the country’s north and lower but equally unacceptable rates of poverty in the rest of the country.
In reality these translate into maternal and child mortality rates, out-of-school children numbers and lack of access to basic services that are among the worst in the whole world. Higher levels of poverty, exceeding 60 percent in rural areas and 45 percent in urban centres have been documented by the National Bureau of Statistics.
The extent to which the prevalence poverty in Nigeria translates to abuse of human rights is underlined by the widespread corruption in government over the past six decades, characterized by widespread looting of the national treasury of funds that could’ve been used to provide an improved standard of living that would’ve taken care of the education, housing, health and many other basic needs of the populace. These needs have remained unattended to in Nigeria.
Indeed, Nigerian state inclinations appear to be generally anti-poor, seemingly revelling in the abuse of their human rights. One illustration of this is the 1991 demolition of the Maroko district of Lagos by then military governor, Col. Raji Rasaki. The shanty town occupied by an estimated 300,000 people was demolished without any compensation or alternatives provided for them.
This paved the way for the takeover of the area by the rich, leading to the emergence of the Lekki residential district of Lagos.
Since then, similar demolitions have followed in different parts of the country, especially in Abuja. Currently the Kaduna state government under Nasir el-Rufai is conducting similar demolitions of the homes of the poor in parts of the city of Zaria, without compensation. As the minister in charge of Abuja a decade and a half ago, he had initiated the Abuja demolitions.
What the Nigerian situation calls for is the adoption of what the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights calls “a rights-based approach” that takes cognizance of the “chronic deprivation of resources, capacities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.”
Mass poverty and increasing inequality have been identified by experts as a prime cause of the country’s growing instability, violence and conflicts. These in turn have exacerbated human rights abuses across the country, with security forces often adopting a heavy-handed approach that only leads to further violations of civil liberties.
For Nigeria there’s a need to begin to address its mass poverty and widening inequality as a measure to increase the protection of human rights. The country’s wealth and resources, if fairly managed in place of the current plunder, can go a long way in achieving the objective.
“The elimination of extreme poverty should not be seen as a question of charity, but as a pressing human rights issue,” says the UNHCR. “Its persistence in countries that can afford to eliminate it amounts to a clear violation of fundamental human rights.”
Cover Photo Credit: Businessday.ng
Photo Credit: Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism