A Non-Governmental Organisation, Green and White Youth Voices Initiative, has said that the country needs to initiate people-oriented policies and programmes that will ensure rapid growth.
The NGO also advocated people-oriented government in our system of democracy to save the country from disintegration.
The Founder and Chairman of the organisation, Comrade Markson Onwukwe, said that the benefits of such a system included a reduction in the number of failed projects scattered across the country
“Above all, through such popular participation, the people will be able to empower themselves to resist exploitation by government officials, who have often used implementation of poverty reduction and people empowerment programmes to enrich themselves,” he said.
Onwukwe, who spoke to our correspondent in Owerri, the Imo State capital, maintained that there had always been a deliberate policy to disempower the masses of economic livelihood so as to perpetually impoverish them.
He, however, added that empowering the masses would liberate them from poverty.
“Again, evidence from various poverty alleviation programmes in the last few years indicates that the economic empowerment in a political vacuum does not produce positive results so far as poverty reduction programmes are designed and implemented by the same classes that brought about the disempowerment and alienation of the masses in the first place,” he said.
He pointed out that most funds government officials received from World Bank and other international financial institutions for poverty alleviation programmes were not applied for such purpose, rather they often used for propaganda at international level.
He, therefore, called for a re-engineering of the country’s social and political landscape, if the nation would want to succeed in the current dispensation.
“It’s poverty and poor economy that make the masses, particularly the youth, to support politicians, because if the majority of them are gainfully employed or economically empowered, they won’t have the time and space to run around politicians,” he said.
Also speaking, the NGO’s General Secretary, Ademola Olagunju, noted that a large section of the country, particularly the youth, women, peasants, traders and workers had endured severe economic crisis and marginalisation from the country’s political process in the past five years.
“It is obvious that these masses were instrumental to our nationalists acquiring independence from the colonial power, yet they have been alienated and marginalised from the nation’s political and development processes,” he said.
He opined that overcoming the difficulty required designing a new system of governance at all levels that would not only focus on the people and their needs, but would empower them to contribute to the development of their communities through active participation.
