I took a long breath before engaging with this.

Over the years, due to the nature of my work, I have come to realise that many of those who live abroad and in urban cities in Africa don’t really understand what development and advancement mean to the people in rural communities.

When they write of poverty, they largely do not understand what it means, and some of them do not engage with the poor; therefore, they do not understand the layers of poverty and the power of a poverty mindset.

I travel widely, and you can see me on a yacht in Monaco today and also on a farm in Ughelli tomorrow. I traverse all the layers of society.

From the world of the old money, the upper class, the nouveau riche, the working class, the middle class, the lower class, and the very poor.

Sometimes those in the lower class see themselves as poor, and sometimes those in the middle class see themselves as poor; many in the working class see themselves as poor.

This is why they responded to the Akara and Kulikuli statement of Nigeria’s first lady with bile

A friend of mine is the head of the legal department of a financial institution in Lagos.

Her older brothers, all three of them, are thriving in their careers.

Their father recently clocked seventy, and they decided they would upgrade his house at Fiditi Village and buy him a new Toyota Prado while they buy their mum a new Toyota Highlander to upgrade their lives.

Their mum had a local roadside bukateria built with planks, which she had been running for years, while their dad was a retired principal.

They decided to build a proper Lagos-level eatery for their mother and to start a consulting service company for their father, where he could work with teachers in AFIJIO local government who are struggling with their professional careers for a token.

Their parents had struggled to send all four of them to school, and they had made it in life; they felt it was time to repay the kindness.

When they shared the idea with their mother, she hushed them and said they must be crazy. “Where will I get the customers to come and eat in an air-conditioned eatery in Fiditi? Do you want people to say that I am using their destinies to make money? Don’t you understand how the folks in this environment think?

That you are now big in the city does not mean you should all be foolish; kill that idea immediately!”

Their father was more gentle; he told them they would ostracise him from his friends if they bought him a big car and changed his small house into a mansion.

He said, “My friends whose children are still struggling will see this as an affront; they will think I am showing off, and many of them will not feel comfortable sitting and eating or drinking with me anymore.

They will call me proud, and they may even decide to do something diabolical to your children so that you will not use your blessings to spite them anymore.

Your ideas are well-intentioned, but they will disrupt my life and lead me to an early grave.

Please come to church and do thanksgiving party with me, let us take pictures and allow my friends the honour of being comfortable to attend the birthday celebration with me. God bless you.”

When my friend was sharing this with me, she said she had forgotten that the paradigm of measuring development and achievement in cities is very different from the one used to measure the same in rural areas.

Apart from those who are just being disruptive for political reasons, the idea that empowering people at the very last rung of the economic ladder with money to boost their trade and acquire a skill is being frowned upon is shocking to me.

I have run a widows ministry since 2019, where we give the widows from all over Nigeria who registered with us 5000 naira stipend a month (it was later increased to 7,500 Naira.)

I toyed with the idea of shutting down this ministry a while ago because I felt the money was too little, and despite trying very hard, I couldn’t increase the funding as I had hoped.

One of the widows living in Ota, Ogun State, called me and said, “Sir, I had a dream that you stopped sending me money. In that dream, I was crying to God that he had cut off my oesophagus, and I could no longer swallow spit” (She said it in the Yoruba language.)

I assured her that we would not stop sending out the stipends and stuck to it.

When those who live in New York, London, Paris, Monaco, Dubai and so on read news of people surviving on 50,000 Naira a month in the cities in Nigeria, they look at how much they earn per hour and curse Nigeria.

I went to Gombe, and I met with a Master’s degree holder who said she had just been sacked from her job. I asked her how much she was earning, and she said twenty thousand Naira a month.

I cringed.

She saw the look on my face and said, “I use it to meet my needs, sir. I really need this job”

I found her another job that started paying her 50,000 Naira a month. She said the money was too much, but it would help her increase her savings.

In development communication, one does not isolate an issue without considering the dynamics at a local level.

If you build a big mall in Akinmoorin or Aawe, where would you get the customers to rent the shops and stock goods there or the people who would patronise them?

Empowerment programs aimed at helping the non-literate, unskilled, the poor and rural dwellers to feel the impact of government and get economically engaged should be lauded and encouraged.

I recently wrote about the large number of beggars in Oyo Town, strong young men who should be farming or engaged in other positive activities are hanging out in front of Ace Supermarket, Chicken Republic, Owode Area in general, Ajiwunmi canteen and other places, constituting a nuisance to car owners.

If they can be empowered and incentivised to work, it will be of great benefit to society, but no right-thinking person will give them millions to squander.

They must learn how to earn money by contributing their quota of value to society.

I recently told a dear sister that when we are talking about poverty, she should sit it out. I said this because whenever she talked about the poor, the picture I got was of an average family at the beginning of their rise in life.

Two graduates cannot be poor unless they choose to be.

The poor have no formal education, have no formal skills, wake up not knowing where the day’s meal will come from, are not located in an environment brimming with opportunities, are limited by time and space, and cannot create wealth by themselves.

The people in this category are the ones that we must encourage to benefit from any welfare and empowerment scheme the government, corporate entities or individuals may offer.

We must not attack the government for helping such people for political reasons or just because we need a talking point.

We may not be able to relate to them or identify with them, but that does not mean they don’t exist or need all the help they can get.

-GSW-