The Primacy of Social Inclusion

By Kayode Komolafe

kayode.komolafe@thisdaylive.com

0805 500 1974

While politicians are legitimately planning for political power in 2023, it is also important to pay due attention to what is happening in the social realm right now.

There are issues of social exclusion, the dignity of the human person and widening inequality. These are central issues that should be addressed today as they cannot wait for even another month more.

Tackling the issues requires “the fierce urgency of now,” to borrow the phrase employed by American civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in a different context on August 28, 1963.

The point has been made from very respectable quarters that the vertical restructuring of the Nigerian federation should even precede the elections. For some, a new constitution should be made before you could talk of legitimate elections. So, some patriots have continued with the agitation for restructuring despite the moves at the National Assembly to review the constitution. Furthermore, discussions towards the next year presidential election are largely in geo-political terms. The focus of pundits is on the ethnic or regional origins of presidential aspirants as well as their proclaimed faiths.

However, politicians in and out of power do not seem to recognise the primacy of the unjust social structure of the system and the crisis emanating from it. The horizontal manifestations of the social crisis include worsening poverty, exclusion of millions of people, absence of wider social protection, deepening inequality and the lack of respect for the dignity of persons.

In other words, the lot of the people in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps and the other victims of the festering humanitarian crisis deserves urgent attention. In the same vein, the urgent response to the condition of children dying of starvation and dehydration cannot be postponed till after the election regardless of who the winner would be 12 months from now.

In a clime of issue-based politics, the announcement two days ago by the federal government of a “five-year strategic roadmap” on social investments ought to generate a virile debate among political parties.

In fact, the debate ought to be led by the party in power at the centre, the All Progressives Congress (APC) while the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and other parties should also be interested in the “roadmap” presented by a ministry for which hundreds of billions are voted yearly.

Ordinarily, the programmes that the Humanitarian Affairs Ministry is expected to implement are those ones that a typical social democratic party should articulate with vigour while a right- of -the -centre party is expected to sharply criticise the programmes from its ideological perspectives. The work of the ministry ought to be a major issue in the next year’s election. But no major party has efficiently articulated a programme of social democracy or liberal economic reforms in this dispensation. It is, therefore, unclear what the party positions are on matters of social investments. Yet, parties ought to state their positions on the programmes. Well, it is predictable that politicians would just ignore the roadmap while continuing with the debate over power rotation and other geo-political calculations they consider more important in the race towards 2023.

At the launch of the the rejig of humanitarian interventions programme, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development Sadiya Umar-Farouq said it was done in fulfilment of the mandate President Muhammadu Buhari gave her when she was appointed in 2019.

According to the minister, the strategic theme is as follows: “Mapping out a life of dignity for all.” Instructively, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has reportedly drawn a link between the roadmap and the recently launched National development Plan.

Elements of the strategy include implementation, review and monitoring of the social programmes for the purpose of achieving greater results.

Farouq said the plan is a product of the analysis of the feedbacks the ministry got from its public. Among the objectives of the plan are strategic partnerships, mainstreaming the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the integration of the social investment programmes and the inclusion of those with disability. The ministry is also scaling up its capacity to deal with natural and man-made disasters.

Besides, the also plans to coordinate the implementation and evaluation of its signature programmes better in the next five years. These programmes include the National Social Investment Programmes (NSIPS), the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, the N-Power Programme, the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) and the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT). The minister also pointed to some steps already taken to realise the broad objectives of the roadmap. Significantly, the National Commission for Persons with Disabilities (NCPWD) has been established. Similarly, the Board of the National Senior Citizens Centre has also been constituted. It is also worth noting that the President has launched the Alternate School Programme (ASP) in response to the social disaster inherent in the burgeoning population of children out of school.

Nevertheless, Nigeria is certainly not yet on the road to social protection given the fact of millions who still lack access to basic needs.

Doubtless, a lot deficits are still noticeable in the operations of the ministry despite the minister’s upbeat mood in her recent statement on the roadmap. She claimed that the ministry had embarked on self-evaluation. She should also be receptive to the critical assessment of the public.

The public perception is quite different.

For instance, not a few members of the public would wonder what has been the impact of the Alternate School Programme of the government given the number of children still roaming the streets during school hours in cities and rural areas.

Given the huge amount of money voted for the programmes of the ministry, the public is surely owed greater accountability. In this sense, accountability is in both moral and material terms. So, it is not only a matter of Naira and Kobo; it is also about proper articulation of policies. To be fair to the minister, if the APC were to be a party in the organic sense of it, the party ought to embark on the broad articulation of the programmes of the ministry and those of other departments and agencies. The programmes are so pivotal to social cohesion that the instrument of a political party properly organised should mobilise popular support for its conception and implementation. But that may be too much to ask of a party that seems incapable of even organising a national convention after 20 months of allegedly planning to do so.

Elsewhere, social democratic and right-wing parties are even debating the efficacy of Universal Basic Income in deeply philosophical terms as part of anti-poverty policies. In Nigeria, even the Conditional Cash Transfer on a severely limited scale is being glibly dismissed by our neo-liberal experts. These experts receive their incomes in millions; so they cannot imagine what impact N5, 000 could make to a poor family!

The sensitive nature of the job of the social development ministry does not give room for opaqueness. When you handle the affairs of the poor and the distressed, you cannot be tired of making explanations. The ministry should be seen to be pursuing the cause of social inclusion fervently with utmost transparency.

The public, in turn, should avoid cynicism in viewing the work of the ministry. Such an approach would be grossly unhelpful.

The hundreds of billions of naira being spent by the ministry belong to the people. In this light, the five-year plan announced by Farouq should not only be subjected to a critical examination; the work of the ministry could be improved upon with constructive ideas from the public on the design and implementation of programmes.

For instance, some programmes of the ministry should be better structured and institutionalised where possible. Beyond giving cash and care, some structures should be put in place for sustainability.

The process of getting the benefits across to the people should not be made complicated. While basic principles of checks and caution are maintained, things should be made as easy as possible for the beneficiaries.

The ultimate question in the debate over the efficacy of social protection programmes is this: where is the money to fund it? In places where one form of social policy or the other has succeeded, it has always been a deliberate choice of governments based on ideological convictions. To the neo-liberals, welfare is a dirty word. They say it promotes laziness. Yet, you don’t have to be versed in Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history to gauge the ominous consequences of social exclusion. So, it is a matter of priority in the face of obviously limited resources. A government that is convinced that no investment could be greater than the investment in the people would surely make it a priority at the expense of other things.

The efficiency and honesty of implementation also matter. Only the poor who deserve the benefits should have access.

Besides, a programme of social inclusion can only be implemented in a setting where the role of the state in tackling poverty and inequality is widely acknowledged.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, millions of children in the United States got access to free lunch for years because the economic crisis made their parents poorer. That happened in the headquarters of global capitalism. But here in Nigeria, our neo-liberals dismiss welfare policies as if their implementation is the original economic sin.

One of the lessons of economic thinking of the last century for mankind is that for the purpose of social cohesion, the state has a primary role in promoting the welfare of the people.

That’s why wise governments around the world are investing heavily in the welfare of their people regardless of the technical arguments of some experts to the otherwise.

There is, therefore, a lot of wisdom in the important provision in the much-despised 1999 Constitution that “the primary purpose government is the security and welfare of the people.”