The President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwunmi Adesina has lamented the takeover of many parts of the country by criminal elements, noting that “criminal economy is ending the real economy of Nigeria.”
Adesina said this while raising concerns about the rising poverty levels in Nigeria while speaking during the 90th birthday lecture of a former head of state Yakubu Gowon in Abuja on Friday.
The AfDB President noted that the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, in 2022 estimated that 63% of persons living within Nigeria are multi-dimensionally poor.
He further noted that the AfDB report indicated that over half of the population of Nigeria cook with charcoal wood, other than clean out energy.
“High deprivations are also apparent nationally in sanitation, health care, food security, and housing poverty,” he said on Friday.
“It is particularly extreme in rural areas were millions of people have been forgotten and abandoned. The gravity of the situation is even worse in northern Nigeria.”
“As we speak today, 65% of the poor, that’s 86 million people live in northern Nigeria while 35% nearly 47 million live in the South.”
The AfDB President noted that the level of poverty has led to rise in crimes and a general fall in the standards of living among Nigerians.
“The level of suffering, helplessness, and abandonment are got in our hope and drowning communities and people in despair as economic activities plummet,” Adesina said. “Consequently, the criminal economy is ending the real economy of Nigeria.”
He therefore suggested ways of addressing the insecurity challenges in the country.
“To address the situation, urgent and comprehensive efforts are needed to restore security and law and order to protect lives, property, and farmlands and to restore normalcy to traumatised zones, towns, villages, and communities to stabilize and restore economic fortunes.
“Education, health, social protection, and jobs for youth programs must be prioritized simultaneously,” he said.
“Decisive and sustained efforts are needed to end insecurity, especially to save vast areas of the food belts of Nigeria in the North West, North East, and Middle ballots.
The deployment of digital surveillance tools, drones artificial intelligence, and satellite imagery needs to be increasingly used to track and provide intelligence,” Adesina said.
“The development and the deployment of farm production protection guards and safe food transport corridors are worth developing.
A more secure Nigeria will be a more food secure Nigeria.”
Adesina also revealed that AfDB and its partners are investing over $840 million in the development of special agro-industrial processing zones in eight states.
“This will help Nigeria to process and add value to all of its agricultural commodities and establish critically needed platforms for becoming competitive in global agricultural value chains,” he said.