A former National Coordinator of the National Poverty Eradication Programme, Professor Magnus Kpakol, has warned that cash transfers alone cannot lift Nigerians out of poverty, urging the Federal Government to focus more on building productive capacity and creating sustainable incomes.

Kpakol, who spoke during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Friday, said poverty reduction programmes should ultimately be judged by whether beneficiaries could graduate from welfare and become economically independent.

“At the end of the day, it’s not about cash transfers. It’s not about all of that. It’s not about money given to somebody. It’s about us being more able to produce the goods and services that the people of the world want,” he said.

Kpakol, however, commended the Federal Government’s new poverty reduction programme, describing it as a good initiative, but said its communication to Nigerians needed improvement.

“Let me say right away that I commend the programme. I think it’s a good programme. The problem is with the communication. I’m not so sure that it’s being communicated well,” he said.

According to him, the programme appeared to be moving in the right direction, particularly because of its stated intention to help beneficiaries eventually leave welfare.

“But if you look at the meat of the programme, I think that they have talked through it well. I think that they’re trying to go in the right direction,” he said.

He said the key measure of success should be whether beneficiaries could eventually generate sustainable incomes and become capable of supporting others.

“What we want to see is if they can create incomes. And if we want to see if down the road, those people that were in poverty are no longer in poverty. And they are also now in a position where they can take care of other people. So that’s what the test is,” he added.

‘₦40,000 won’t do much’

Kpakol said cash transfers could provide a basic safety net for vulnerable Nigerians but should not be mistaken for a comprehensive poverty-reduction strategy.

“The cash transfer to me is like a basic floor that you put in the programme so people don’t fall into the mire of poverty more and more,” he said.

“₦40,000 is really not enough. It’s not going to do much. But it’s something.”

Drawing on his experience at NAPEP, Kpakol said poverty interventions needed a “ladder” that would enable beneficiaries to move from basic support to economic independence.

“But more importantly, you need a ladder. You need something very catalytic,” he said.

Kpakol recalled that during his time at NAPEP, he introduced a basic income guarantee alongside a Poverty Reduction Accelerator Investment programme, with emphasis on training and building people’s capacity.

“So I knew that I needed to invest in people. But one of the things that I emphasised was training. I wanted to train the people, maybe like financial literacy, even capital development, so that these guys understand what they need to do, you know, as they fight their way out of poverty.”

He welcomed the current administration’s stated intention to graduate beneficiaries from welfare.

“And I heard that from this programme, and I commend that, the fact that they realise you don’t want to keep people in welfare. You want to be able to graduate them,” he said.

Kpakol seeks stronger state involvement

The former NAPEP boss also criticised the tendency of successive Federal Governments to implement major poverty-reduction interventions without sufficient collaboration with state governments.

“I also think that we should have done it in collaboration with the states. I’ve said it before, that sometimes the federal government comes out too arrogant. Not just this federal government, but most federal governments,” he said.

Kpakol argued that states had significant resources that could be combined with Federal Government funding to strengthen poverty interventions.

He estimated the annual Federal Government budget at about $50bn and said the states collectively controlled about $30bn.

“I believe that there’s room there where the state could have, or states could have collaborated with the federal government to make the programme even stronger,” he said.

‘Too many cooks in the kitchen’

Kpakol identified excessive political involvement as another major risk to the success of poverty-reduction programmes.

“On the bottlenecks, the primary bottleneck that I often see is too many people being involved. You have too many cooks in the kitchen,” he said.

He warned that politicians could interfere with the implementation of programmes and undermine their original objectives.

“So when you put this programme out, a programme like this, we put it out, then you would see that politicians jump in from all over the place, and they crowd the kitchen, and they create a lot of commotion in the kitchen,” he said.

“They make it not happen the way you intended it to happen. So you tend to have a lot of unintended consequences and bad representation that come out of a programme like this.”

He also called for greater transparency around the National Social Register, particularly in how beneficiaries are selected.

“They need to tell us how people were chosen on that register. So they’re not just party members or cronies, but is representative of the people of Nigeria and of the communities that you intend to serve,” he said.

Kpakol recalled that during his tenure at NAPEP, beneficiaries were selected through community-level processes in which residents identified people they considered genuinely poor.

“I did a village to village. I actually did this, in fact, on a couple of occasions, they would choose themselves, would choose poor people from their neighbourhood,” he said.

He acknowledged that such systems were not perfect but said transparency was essential to building confidence in government poverty interventions.

‘Industrialisation brings people out of poverty’

Kpakol said the government should put greater emphasis on financial and economic literacy, skills development and productivity.

“What is important, what’s really critical, is not just the cash. We give it to people. But it’s financial literacy, clearly,” he said.

He added that poverty reduction should ultimately focus on building competence, capacity and productivity.

“But really, it’s about how to build competence, how to build capacity, how to cause people to behave well, how to love thy neighbour as thyself, how to be more productive. It’s about being more productive. That’s really what it’s all about.”

Kpakol also identified industrialisation as a critical route out of poverty.

“True industrialisation does bring people out of poverty. We need to promote that more here in Nigeria. We need to get governors to try to get there,” he said.

He called for greater capacity at the local government level to enable communities to participate more effectively in economic development.

Despite his criticisms, Kpakol maintained his support for the Federal Government’s programme.

“This is a laudable programme. It is a good programme. I support it myself. But I think we need to explain what the programme does better to the people,” he said.