Academic Leadership: The Online Journal


Grace Adebo


Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation and has such a great ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. The Nigerian paradox has continued to baffle the world because the poverty level in the country contradicts the country’s immense wealth as over 70 per cent of the population wallow in absolute poverty with no food, clothing or shelter (Obayelu and Ogunlade, 2006). The general picture, however, is of a country struck by poverty, maladministration and increasing internal conflicts. Poverty is painful. The poor suffers physical, emotional and moral pains (Deepa et al, 2000). The poor lives without fundamental freedoms of action and choice that the better-off takes for granted (Sen, 1999). Poor people often lack adequate food and shelter, education and suffer health deprivations that keep them from leading the kind of life that everyone values. They also face extreme vulnerability of ill-health economic dislocation and natural disasters and they are often exposed to ill-treatment by institutions of the State and Society and are powerless to influence key decisions affecting their lives. According to This Day (2007), above one million eight hundred thousand Nigerians stood up against poverty as part of a global call. A record 38 million people world-wide observed the anti-poverty call, eclipsing the 23.5 million figures for 2006.