Nigeria depicts mass poverty as a major world's oil producer and exporter in this 21st century human universe. According to the financial data that are available from the various western international financial agencies, Nigeria has made over $0.5 trillion from her oil sales alone as her state revenues in the last 40 years as an oil exporter. The poverty rate has also continued to rise rapidly on yearly basis since Nigeria began to export her oil and to increase her yearly oil production. Poverty in Nigeria was about 20% in 1980 and it has now risen to over 80% today in 2013. About 112 million Nigerians in a country of over 160 million citizens live in chronic or abject poverty of $1 to $2 a day living expenses. Apart from the massive human poverty today, Nigeria also has nothing on the ground to show for her huge oil wealth and revenues over the decades. The national infrastructures in Nigeria are too old, overcrowded, falling apart and need modernization. The country cannot supply constant electricity for her citizens in the 21st century human universe. The nation's social services are stressed to their limits and totally inadequate, the nation's entire educational systems are in the 20th century in the 21st century world of today, the unemployment rate is over 50% and millions of Nigerian workers with employment in both the private and the public sectors of the economy earn poverty wages and live below poverty lines.
Where is the Nigeria's oil money gone to? Was this money stolen, mismanaged or both? The past and the present Nigeria's leaders and their cronies as well as the Nigeria's top civil servants or the highly placed government officials have systematically over the last few decades siphoned between $300 billion to $400 billion to enrich themselves from the nation's oil revenues. These monies are said to be kept in the foreign banks of some European, Middle East and the Caribbean nations that practice banking secrecy or tax evasion for stolen funds around the world according to the World Bank and the other reputable western financial agencies. The huge mismanagement of the oil money by the Nigeria's leaders and the unabated oil bunkering of the Nigeria's oil have both jointly contributed to the main reason why majority of Nigerians still live today in penury in the midst of plenty.
Poverty will continue to rise year in and year out in Nigeria until there is a government in power in the future in Nigeria that will stamp out this unabated culture of massive official corruption, the mismanagement of Nigeria's funds by her officials and the ending the oil bunkering. This oil wealth can then be channeled properly to address this growing poverty rate in Nigeria and for the true national development of Nigeria instead of privately enriching the deep pockets of the few, privileged and powerful elites.
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