From ‘Bad Samaritans’ to ‘Bad Victims’: A Political Economy of Africa-Nigeria Nexus of Poverty

Introduction

Literature on the political economy of Africa have been vengeful of the role played by those Ha-Joon Chang (2007) calls ‘Bad Samaritans’, that is, wealthy nations that have controlled the direction of the international economic order long enough to determine the ‘morality’ of global trade, debt servicing, aid, policy interventions and thus, the ‘eradication of global, continental regional and national poverty’. The mainstream pervades political economy, history, sociology, anthropology and economy. These ‘Bad Samaritans’ have not been spared by African Marxist scholars whose sophistry and depth of analysis have condemned the Samaritans to disrepute (Ake, 1981). However, these objects of intellectual attack retain great influence on the creative enterprises of globalisation despite the remarkable successes attained by Asian and African entrepreneurs in driving the goals of global trade. The structures that entrenched the Samaritans’ monopoly are historical; and these, more than other factors are collectively and arguably the starting point. While the democratisation of that monopoly is the objective of the Asian and African counterparts, individual countries have remained active in their bid to understand the process and utilise the opportunities that unfold. The case of Nigeria is unique in the sense of its globally acknowledged capacity in terms of human and material resources, its potentials and its successes in the last six decades of its participation in the globalisation process. Yet it is a poverty-stricken country. The ironies along its trajectory generate increasing curiosity and, in many instances, disillusions given what it is capable of accomplishing against what it actually accomplishes and which in other less favourable contexts have been surmounted by its peers. This study examines the ‘poverty’ that dominates this trend from a historical standpoint.

The political economy approach has been used as a significant methodical tool to interrogate phenomena such as spaces, states and, in the more recent times, people. Marxists have substantially utilised its methods to confront orthodoxy and oppressive systems and propose alternatives. Its sound intellectual flavour, substantial since Marx and Weber, has been remarkably flexible, inspiring further debates that have transformed scholarship in anthropology, history, economics, sociology, psychology and advocacy. A distinguished range of studies have appeared showcasing the creative ways in which this method’s potential is capable of ‘exhuming’ and substantiating hitherto neglected aspects of research. One which appeals to this study is Ha-Joon Chang’s book Bad Samaritans. In his treatise, his country, previously an economic underdog was able to take the lead in reinventing itself towards playing a significant role in the globalisation process – an achievement that other nations like Japan and Mozambique also shared in the course of their learning process. Despite what he called ‘the guilty secrets of the “Bad Samaritans” and their threat to global prosperity’, Korea and others like it are able to engage purposely the political, industrial and entrepreneurial faculties of the state to make meaning of their capacities. In effect, this study reviews Chang’s thesis as follows: that it is not the ‘Bad Samaritans’ that should be feared but the ‘Bad Victims’ who actually become the threat to their own path to growth and development. That ‘Bad Samaritans’ could be identified is a plus in itself; and this, African politicians and intellectuals have done in the last decades of statehood and nation-building. However, not realising how to engage bilateral and multilateral interventions meaningfully is an indictment on the competence of Africa’s state managers. Chang’s thesis points us to the need for states like Nigeria to advance beyond its shallow engagement of the opportunities of the globalisation process – a mission that remains stunted by the political economy of poverty that reigns significantly in its history and its present. This study reviews the character of this process via the African route.

Other studies have also engaged the reality from the standpoint of the relevance of the man on the ‘other side of governance’ who daily institutionalises livelihood craft of survival to entrench meaning to life, even if at the fringes (Adebanwi, 2017; Guyer, 1997, 2004; Guyer et al., 2002; Hage, 2004). These recent studies focus attention on the micro dynamics of urbanity and social development, further pointing towards the need to engage the often-neglected version (micro) of the larger macro-conceptual frameworks adopted by scholars throughout much of the 20th century. Although this study is concerned with poverty – again a somewhat macro phenomenon, it aims to direct attention from the traditional examination of space and state which is rife in the literature on political economy of Nigeria to the historical antecedents of the phenomenon. This is yet to be comprehensive in the literature, given the fact that it is significantly elusive in the effort to address it. Thus, it examines the paucity of local will and interventions to combat poverty vis-à-vis the poverty supposedly introduced and entrenched by the ‘Bad Samaritans’. It analyses the meeting point between the two as further increasing the complexity – each one of the two attracting its flaws towards the confluence and further distracting governance from attaining a semblance of order in addressing poverty. The poverty this paper considers is the poverty of compromise of mission and honest intent on the parts of the ‘experts’ and the ‘governors’. It revisits the historical implications of the phenomenon, beginning from the concept of Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang (2007) to the dysfunctions that served to entrench the poverty of statehood as well as the attendant political economy. Finally, it considers the poverty of interventions that have been the hallmark of governance in Nigeria but which in its submission lacks progress given the compromised nature of the programmes, institutions, projects and committees meant to ‘eradicate’ poverty in the country.

The recurring Africa-Nigeria past

A substantial section of the Nigerian cum African past has been interpreted to have been manipulated by the external factor, generating precedencies that have been read differently in the scholarship. The second consideration is the often-repeated fact that the African past (before the coloniser’s advent) was ‘a thing of potential and pride’ – an efflorescence of indigenous culture that showcased the substance of the precolonial man. At points in time when African humanity and the evolving national identities are called to question, this past re presents the continent’s potential in what Toyin Falola (2018) refers to as nationalism (p. 108). This nationalism as conceptualised in this study, is not to be understood in the form it took in the 1940s through to the 1960s when the former colonial states confronted the colonialists towards independence but in its capacity to recalibrate the international economic order from a standpoint that foregrounds Africa as a single state structure in the scheme of things as envisioned by Kwame Nkrumah. For if in the past, black consciousness could promote anti-slavery sentiments, civil rights, national liberation struggles and political independence, sure it can reconstruct global economy towards challenging hegemony in any form. The substance of past advocacies of black consciousness actually rested in this ‘default setting’ which can be inferred from Falola’s words:

Colonial power, plantation economies, capitalist societies and forms of economic and political power are ultimately vulnerable. For in the final analysis, power is to be confronted, giving rise to acts of resistance and nationalism, all drawing from convergencies of geography, history and culture. (Falola, 2018: 108)

For Africans, this past is physiological for reasons of pigmentation and diaspora, but more for the reason of the substance that the African experience can bring to bear on global humanity. However, the limits to which we subscribe to this substance and relevance in our everyday lives are heightened by certain boundaries in our present realities which are tied to the near-cohesive relationship between local and the global culture. Our romantic attachment to it nonetheless, we sometimes see some of its ‘archaic’ features as inconsequential to the pragmatics of our present, and therefore, we demarcate the lines of their importance. One fundamental thing in Africa’s relationship with that past is that we are at the crossroads of memory management: of which percentage to jettison or to reference.

Although that past recalls the track of an orchestrated intent – whereby a set of people emptied their identity into the subjected; recalibrating institutions, local authorities, value systems, poverty, wealth, technology, weaponry, leadership, land, livelihood, politics, dress codes, thought processes and worldview, it is becoming stale. And because we were so significantly emptied of our identities, we engaged its rape intellectually; dissipating our faculties into demonstrating the extent of the rape committed by the identity-change perpetrators from outside. We stimulated discussions and countered existing arguments that pointed to the ‘nothingness’ of our being, and through immeasurable data, we presented the wealth inherent in the indigenous labyrinths of our identity. A continental affair, our philosophical and historical arguments were tailored to meet the professional qualifications for sound arguments as standardised by Western traditions of thought processes and rational debate. So versatile did our intellectual engagement become that the very continent where it was said that history did not exist is now the continent of ‘uncontested centrality in any metanarrative of world history’ (Odhiambo, 2001: 1). That past became the pedestal on which we clamoured for the sovereignty of the identity we inherited. Not only did we accept it to define our place in the world, we substantiated its role in the brotherhood we shared with our contemporaries. Mixed as it was among the early political elite then, given the dilutions in descents (verifiable from the arrival and settlement of the descendants of those carried into slavery in some parts of West Africa), the nationalists nonetheless fought a united front against those acclaimed to have emptied us of meaning and our humanity. And then we proceeded to the next stage of the trajectory – to discrediting the culprits. It was a success achieved, albeit to a certain measure, because the ownership of the global audience to which our messages were directed still belonged to the objects of our anger.

The challenge of ‘past tense’

While we wrestled with a compromised past, the truth of the matter remained a troubling question: what were we prepared to do with it? After all, in other arguments, everyone else had pasts pointing to dislocations of local humanity and the remarkable capacity of those who turned the tides of such dislocations into national pride and patriotic history (Gee 2011: 103–128). Justice is thus done by the people who carved niches from a raped past, despite varieties in the reductions of the local humanities involved in the process. From that compromised past also emerged a recalibration of ‘primitive’ poverty into an ‘enlightened’ one; masterminded by new forces in the relationships between state and society (Acemoglu et al., 2013: 344). In the context of the new African states, these included culture, land, power, the gun, labour, money and ethnicity (Akinyele, 2003: 123–149; Chikowero, 2015; Feinberg, 2015; Musa, 2015: 43–54). Examining the Zimbabwean experience, Chikowero remarked,

While African agency intervened in conflicting ways that reshaped the nature of colonialism, the colonial cultural nervousness proved as resilient as the physical structures of intensive resource extraction. Some of the alienating cultural attitudes that early generations strived to resist became progressively normalised as part of the larger western hegemonic order of the African everyday that would soon go unremarked, if it was visible at all. (Chikowero, 2015: 295)

In the beginnings, this ‘poverty’ – particularly that of governance – began to demonstrate semblance with the crude counterparts that obtained in the early social experimentation processes of the colonial powers themselves. The direct repercussions included the emergence of a working class, waged labour, the establishment of trade unions, industrial strikes, protests against taxes, child labour, immigration and repatriation, urban crime, urban poverty, very distinguished gaps between urban and rural settlements, racialisation and later, status segmentation of urban infrastructure and such like. With these, the template was drawn and the requirements for entrance into the globalisation process began in earnest. Disarticulations were seemingly expected by the template providers and so machineries were ‘put in place’ to alleviate the crises of adjustment (Adesina, 1997: 67–70). Structures that were put in place, and meant to alleviate the harsh conditions experienced in the colony ‘had been tested and perfected in the societies that produced them’. Hence, the new global state was ‘fortunate’ to enter the league of mentees of ‘developed’ nations that had been ‘empowered’ to provide ‘mentoring’ for the ‘developing’ countries. This orthodoxy ‘should’, in the assessments of the managers, prevent major crises in the upcoming nations and in the event of bankruptcy in political economy, global monetary managers had equally substantial technocracy to apprehend dislocations and enough bureaucracy to maintain ‘positive’ results of studies meant to ‘liberalise the benefits of open economies’. This was, in essence, the ‘philosophy’ behind the interventions of the Bretton Woods and other aid agencies.

Hence, the first definition of the poverty engaged in this paper is that of a mutilated past, as well as Nigeria’s struggle within this context – to align with it and (ironically) champion its understandings of it! The second category of the definition as used in this paper is the continental version of this domesticated poverty. This version was the replication of the same variables in the African space. In the first instance, the globalised context of the variants of this poverty was clear. Since the orthodoxy of the spatial structure (Africa cum Nigeria) had been established, all formal political economies had to conform to the established norms. Hence, the connectivity of approaches was overriding. Virtually all state spaces in the continent emerged from the same experience of domination, and the expected nation-building and ‘development’ challenges were ‘easier to envisage’, particularly so when African philosophical thoughts promoted Pan-Africanism, African socialism, African brotherhood, African bloc at the United Nations, non-alignment, and the eventual regionalism that gained ground in the wake of the nations’ acceptance of their similar economic potentials. Thus, the ‘domestic’ nature of the Nigerian poverty was only modified in its replications in other African counterparts. The implication of this reality was to be seen in the eventual foreign policy pursuit of Nigeria up till 2011 when the Nigerian leader Goodluck Jonathan felt the need to adjust the focus of national interest (Kaita, 2011). Before then, the similarity in the objectives of nationhood among African states inspired Nigeria to empathise and associate with other African states in promoting and actualising what were considered the fundamentals of African trajectory of growth: territorial integrity, fight against neo-colonialism, racism and racial discrimination, nationalism and self-determination. The unwavering commitment demonstrated by Nigeria in human and fiscal resources towards empowering the dignity of the black race was a generic example of the comparative and collective nature of identity management by virtually all the African states. This was an additional feature to world history whereby certain blocs of nations responded to global challenges in different forms as exemplified by nations in Europe when confronted with the menace of the French revolution and Western Europe against Hitler and communism.

Africa in its management of its poverty

While African nations began to understand their collective poverty in the scheme of things, they almost immediately began to confront the internal dysfunctions that arrested their attentions to the need to fight this poverty from within. And this was a greater challenge to the leadership. As eloquent as some countries had been in championing the African identity in the independence decade, they were confronted with the need to translate political thought into pragmatics. The gap between lofty philosophies of state and society, on the one hand, and the institutionalisation of economic rationalities, on the other hand, increasingly widened. The successive inheritors of the heroic intellectualisations of the early set of African leaders began to contemplate between pragmatising political thoughts to address challenges or to jettison intellectual projects to confront immediate hindrances. A certain result was that intellectual rationalisations of state and society were emptied of its substance by some of the new leaders. Those leaders who were members of the early set of the African independence decade began to rationalise their personalised leadership in the long durée. Their philosophies of state which held promise in the early periods eventually emptied their substance in the contexts of self-preservation in power. Those who later held the reins intensified this hold (Kraxberger, 2004: 423–430). Consequently, there emerged the gradual reduction of ideology in leadership and the emergence of opposing factions in the running of state and society, particularly by those who rationalised ideology over the sustained presence of certain leadership groups and the need to prevent society into degenerating into chaos. Amical Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon presented early warning signs that African leadership was drained of ideas and ideologies meant to drive the advancement of social progress in Africa. The result was a further degeneration of the continent into political and economic chaos – a phenomenon that further reified the ‘orthodoxy’ of the global structure to which Africa ‘belonged and should return’ in the sense that its progress should be inspired by the experiences of ‘mentors’.

Implicit in the considerations above is the reality that the once demarcated boundaries of the African states were ‘removed’ by 1985; exactly a hundred years after the famed conference of imperial powers in Berlin. Arguably, several factors entrenched this reality. First was the increasing and overriding influence of global companies over the traditional powers of state in the western world which implied that their products and services flowed freely across African national territories. This according to Rothkopf (2012) was one of the most significant realities that confronted state power in the 20th century (pp. 201–245). Second was the imposition of a blanket economic solution to the crisis ridden economies of African states and which African leadership accepted with much abandon. Third was the following grave consequences of the economic adjustment that followed the implementation of Bretton woods economic solutions in Africa. Fourth was the retained segments of influence over francophone states by France and continual subjection of their joint economies to France’s political economy. Fifth was the state of permanent conflicts within and among African states from the 1980s – a condition that attracted ‘generic strategy of post-conflict state management’, necessitating another round of nation-building among those states. Sixth was the increasing influence of the hegemony of global trade liberalisation that further expanded the linkages of African economies to global private sector control. Seventh was the subjection of African business enterprises to the monopolies of global regulations. Eight was the commitment to the ‘transfer of national wealth as reserves’ into foreign banks. Ninth was the relegation of African currencies to the values promoted by the currencies of mentor nations. Next was Africa’s feature as a depository of weapons for ‘opposition control’ and ‘conflict management’. Next was the near non-existence of traditional qualities of state power in virtually all African states as a result of their diminished role in the management of the representations of global political economy within their territories. Thus, the ‘removal of boundaries’ in the African space was substantial as verifiable in the intrusion of same monetary controls, economic adjustment policies, weaponry, global economic crises, neo-colonial influence and the activities of non-state actors. These widespread similarities of political and economic challenges of the nations pointed to the poverty of the state in Africa (Ake, 1985: 1–8).

The role of global corporations and non-state actors

Rothkopf’s (2012) submission that the power of global corporations has overridden the traditional powers of the state is and would be a major factor in international state and non-state relations in the foreseeable future is instructive. This is more so in the African context. And in particular, the Nigerian space. If we begin with Claude Ake’s (1985) reference to the state in Nigeria as ‘typical of periphery capitalist formations generally’ and therefore has . . . ‘limited autonomy’, we would be adding to the dilemma of the inherited identity that it had at independence (pp. 9–32). Further to that is now the consideration of the state being on the receiving end of the economic powerplay of stock exchanges in New York or London. As products and services of companies gain access into the Nigeria market, there often follows an increasing need for their sustained presence (Yahaya, 1993: 29). Thus, we confront conditions whereby non-state actors, particularly global corporations, terrorist groups and non-governmental organisations, promote and ‘entextualise’ their knowledges, technologies, services, or their fanaticisms over territories that were not in the first instance the focus of their experimentations, activities and accomplishments as successful bodies in the international scene. This historical phenomenon played out successfully in the capturing of indigenous loyalty and space for the British in the colonial period as was the case of George Goldie in his appropriation of northern Nigeria for the British monarch before the arrival of Lord Lugard in the mid-19^th century, as well as the activities of other British companies of the same stature (Austen and Vaughn, 2011; Flint, 1960; Shenton, 1986). At present, the capacities of bodies such as these have monopolised a threatening array of transnational tools like money, arms, fundamentalism, ideology, network, intellectual resources and technology over a vast network of domestic spaces; in addition to the trend of states currying their competence and even favour to gain access to the net worth that these non-state actors can make available. Within the rivalry between state and non-state actors, as Rothkopf (2012) elaborates, lies the domestic spaces that are redesigned and redefined by these bodies and their implantation of new approaches and perspectives to environmental, economic, religious and political phenomena (pp. 201–245).

A phenomenon like poverty is addressed by these non-state actors (i.e. particularly those that are directly related to the management of economic regimes) in three-dimensional ways: first, is their near-perfect ‘understanding’ of poverty in its form as ‘originaire’ in the space of origin of such body, particularly from the perspective that poverty presents some form of ‘universality of domestic spaces’ worldwide. This is the implementation of what is considered orthodoxy as alluded to earlier. In such instances, the ‘mastery’ of poverty by these non-state actors is ‘complete’ in the sense that the ‘theoretical and pragmatic orientations of poverty’ are culturally rooted in the places of origin of these non-state actors (i.e. the Western) and instructively, therefore, a template for the understanding of poverty elsewhere. Second, the ‘understanding’ of poverty in such contexts reifies the ‘authority’ of the non-state actor in the understanding of such phenomenon and is thus ‘chartered’ to develop appropriate interventions for the benefits of the receiving spaces globally. Third, to increase the objectivity of its capacity and competence, its approach is further consolidated by its reference to and inculcations of its field work in the specified area of intervention (in this case, poverty), in other spaces. This is a ‘further testament to the versatility of its competence’ because of the ways and means it is able to juxtapose the ‘ethnographies’ of climes in its custody. Since the ‘humanity’ it serves ‘remains the same’, albeit located in different geographies, differences in the appearance and content of such phenomenon like poverty are reappraised through old theories or through the formulation of new ones – which have often proved to be potentially and remarkably apposite to the variables of poverty that exist in the receiving spaces and the consequent interventions that are designed for the specific category of poverty that is identified. Fourth, and authoritatively too, the non-state actor gathers the data that unveil the content of the local poverty and generate statistics that the indigenous sovereign authority is unable to generate given the inconsistencies in leadership and the corruption of local political economy. Significantly, the ability of the non-state actor to exhume, engage and utilise such data ‘manifests its multiple competencies’ in the specific area of proposed intervention. The data amplify the ‘relevance of the contexts’ in which the proposed interventions had subsisted and aligns the presently identified indigenous content of poverty with the ‘tested models’. With such information, it proceeds to engage the governing elite towards implementing the intervention. This, again, lies within the competence of the corporate intervention, given the sophistication of its capacity to lobby and the resources at its disposal to disburse. Moreso, for states whose managers of national political economy understand the development implications of rejecting such ‘largesse’. Expectedly, the interventions are subjected to ‘scrutiny’ by the ‘receiving’ state’s laws and regulations, followed by a ‘review of the benefits’ therein by national leaders.

The Nigerian Quagmire

One of the most repeated phrases uttered by politicians in Nigeria is the eradication of poverty. As part of his address to a number of diplomats in September 2019 during the United Nations General Assembly Meetings in New York, highlighting his administration’s commitment to eradicating poverty, Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari said,

It is for this reason that in May this year, we committed ourselves to lifting approximately 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within a 10 year period. This is a national development priority and in line with the aspirations of the SDGs. (Odunsi, 2019)

This statement reiterates, again, the heightened expression that often greets the beginnings of poverty eradication programmes that eventually become a disconnect between intention and actuality (Ujah, 2019). Proclamations like this call to question the status of the expected cumulative effects of interventions since the development plans of the 1960s and the 1970s as well as the multiplicity of policies, agencies and programmes that were developed in quick succession from the 1980s. In its utopian fiscal format, national poverty eradication is the default implication of sound budgeting, reliable data and accountability. It is not a redoubling of efforts as the establishment of poverty eradication programmes indicate. In other climes, there are often no direct establishment of so-called poverty eradication programmes. If any, they are embedded in the national development plans that encapsulate such vision. Consider the following statement by the US president George W. Bush in 2001:

Can you imagine a country that was unable to grow enough food to feed the people? It would be a nation that would be subject to international pressure. It would be a nation at risk. And so when we are talking about American agriculture, we’re really talking about a national security issue. (Line, 2008: 118)

Instructively, poverty alleviation programmes in Nigeria are designed to ‘fix’ the disconnect that exists between governance, on the one hand, and the factuality of its impact, on the other. The disconnect, meant to be bridged by direct results of such programmes, is again, going by the history of poverty eradication programmes in Nigeria, choked by multiple entries of interventions that further complicate the gap. Between 1975 and 2019, there have been series of poverty alleviation policies, programmes, projects and committees. In this period of 44 years, an increasing number of overlapping objectives presided over poverty eradication programmes in Nigeria. ¹ The list compiled here is not categorical in the sense that it does not separate policies from programmes and projects or schemes or committees. The purpose is to emphasise the diversification of the entries and point to the desperation of governance in addressing a persisting issue of national and global significance; and with the benefit of hindsight, an overarching poverty of the approaches. In other words, given the inefficiency of these ‘innovations’ and the strange perpetuity of the phenomenon they were supposed to address, it is apposite to argue that there has been in Nigeria a politics of poverty meant to redirect resources towards promoting continuing submission and loyalty of the supposed beneficiaries – a phenomenon that Achille Mbembe calls ‘the aesthetics of vulgarity’ and the sustained implementation of declarations rather than the actual eradication or reduction as the case may be (Mbembe 2001). And as with every challenge that are poorly attended, it undergoes sophistication, creativity and refinement; often facing the danger of jargons, expressed with less communication abilities, often ‘emphasising its seeming substance’ but lacking the very nature of inclusion necessary for its audience. Hence, it doesn’t outlast the moment or the periods of its orators’ performance. It is in this context, the multiplicity of poverty eradication interventions and its ironic decapacitation in the scheme of things is explainable in the Nigerian context.

From the foregoing, we see the phenomenon of poverty confronted with vastly available tools, and approaches but the increasing ill-focused nature of the strategies compromises the efforts to combat it. This is where the irony lies and thus emerges the poverty that deepens the quagmire. In 2019, Nigeria was rated one of the poverty capitals of the world after a consideration by experts of the indices that showcase poverty. This, in a very certain way is what promotes the incursion of certain emotion-driven analyses by Western development experts as to why countries such as Nigeria could be among those so classified even if such classification seems to jettison some evidences of progress. Classifying Nigeria as poverty capital of the world increases curiosity as to the possibility of Nigeria having a good number of those called the Bottom Billion by Paul Collier and a huge disappointment on the part of those who believe that a country like Nigeria should have long passed such disparaging categorisation. It attracts not only arrogant scholarship among highly rated development scholars but also increases the disillusions of the citizenry which at present generates massive insecurity in several parts of the country. Although not specifically directed at analysing Nigeria, the submission of Paul Collier (2008) seemingly reiterates a certain discouragement that fits the Nigerian challenge:

Unfortunately, it is not just about giving these countries our money. If it were, it would be relatively easy because there are not that many of them. With some important exceptions, aid does not work so well in these environments, at least as it had been provided in the past. Change in the societies at the very bottom must come predominantly from within; we cannot impose it on them. In all these societies there are struggles between brave people wanting change and entrenched interests opposing it. To date we have largely been bystanders in this struggle. We can do much more to strengthen the hand of the reformers. But to do so we will need to draw upon tools – military interventions, international standard setting, and trade policy – that to date have been used for other purposes. The agencies that control these instruments have neither knowledge of nor interest in the problems of the bottom billion. They will need to learn, and governments will need to learn how to coordinate this wide range of policies. (p. xi)

More so because others like Jeffrey Sachs (2015) have worked with the Nigerian government at generating substantial understanding of factors that aid poverty and the ways to combat it (p. 195).

Thus, poverty eradication programmes in Nigeria seem to be an unending phenomenon, but the policy, the literature and the actual interventions are at odds, defying harmonious understanding towards bringing the meaningful and expected change. The solution is the need to address the compromised humanity that runs the relevant institutions and that plagues the gaps and underscores the disconnections. This is germane if we consider Kofi Anyidoho’ (2020) submission: ‘What a 21^st century Africa needs is a Civilisation, not Development’ (p. 3). This is instructive because the two are always at odds in their relationship and this is traceable to the quality of the humanity that governs the resources, and infrastructures and the policies as well as the interventions meant to construct a veritable understanding of poverty that is enough to address its challenging consequences.

Conclusion

This paper slightly amends Ha-Joong Chang’s reference to the suspicious philanthropy of the world’s wealthy nations, particularly those in the West. Referenced as ‘Bad Samaritans’ by Chang, this paper redirects the emphasis from the ‘Bad Samaritans’ to the ‘Bad victims’; that is, states that increase their self-vulnerability through self-compromise. Hence, it has examined the contradictions in the management of poverty in the African continent using the Nigerian case study and focusing on the self-compromise that plagues the efforts at combating it. This self-compromise reduces the capacity of states like Nigeria to understand that capitalist countries are under no moral obligation to develop the country’s political economy. The earlier the managers of the country’s political economy realise this, the better. It thus calls for a responsible understanding and management of the challenges of development by these ‘victim’ states to effectively utilise the benefits of globalisation despite the hegemony of the philanthropists’ advances. Nigeria in particular is a confused state, given its vast potentialities as of one of the most enriched countries of the world, yet one of the most starved of directions as to how to address poverty-related realities in its citizens’ livelihood. Its capacity for deliberate retrogression and unjustifiable suppression of vision and honest intent is almost unimaginable. The ‘hidden’ morality of Ja Hoong’s ‘Bad Samaritans’ is such that respects the inherent vision and mission of the partaker of development. When the colonialists arrived African shores, they came on a ‘civilising mission’ not in the sense of obligation to their supposed hosts but in the sense that those on that mission were civilised enough to replicate the templates of developments that were routine in the nations of origin. This is arguable to some degree. The accomplishment of their mission was already attained in the quality of their humanity that administered the imperial project. They were not only trained in some of the best universities in Europe, those who were to inherit the responsibility were also trained in the languages and cultures and anthropological roots of the peoples they were to colonise. Thus, the objectives of the imperial outpost were already attained in the quality of the humanity involved even before the colonial project began. This historical fact is what must be recalled and used as a motivating principle by Nigerian cum African administrators of poverty alleviation programmes in the continent.