By Adekunle Adekoya

On Wednesday, President Muhammadu Buhari returned to the country after attending a conference of the Least Developed Countries, LDCs, in Doha, the Qatari capital. For me his attendance, and by extension, Nigeria’s participation at the conference raises a number of fundamental questions, which have been at the core of my assessment of the Nigerian power elite. 

According to Wikipedia, the least developed countries, LDCs, are developing countries listed by the United Nations that exhibit the lowest indicators of socio-economic development. The concept of LDCs originated in the late 1960s and the first group of LDCs was listed by the UN in its resolution 2768 (XXVI) on 18 November 1971.

A country is classified among the Least Developed Countries if these three criteria are evident:

*Poverty– adjustable criterion based on  gross national income, GNI, per capita averaged over three years. As of 2018, a country must have GNI per capita less than US$1,025 to be included on the list, and over $1,230 to graduate from it.

*Human resource weakness (based on indicators of nutrition, health, education and adult literacy).

*Economic vulnerability (based on instability of agricultural production, instability of exports of goods and services, economic importance of non-traditional activities, merchandise export concentration, handicap of economic smallness, and the percentage of population displaced by natural disasters).

As of December 2020, 46 countries were still classified as LDC, while six graduated between 1994 and 2020. The World Trade Organisation, WTO, recognises the UN list and says that: “Measures taken in the framework of the WTO can help LDCs increase their exports to other WTO members and attract investment. In many developing countries, pro-market reforms have encouraged faster growth, diversification of exports, and more effective participation in the multilateral trading system.”

The United Nations says that least developed countries or LDCs are low-income countries confronting severe structural impediments to sustainable development. They are highly vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks and have low levels of human assets. There are currently 46 countries on the list of LDCs which is reviewed every three years by the Committee for Development, CDP. LDCs have exclusive access to certain international support measures in particular in the areas of development assistance and trade.

The 46 countries include Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. Others are Haiti, Kiribati, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Solomon Islands. The rest are Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, Yemen, and Zambia. Thirty-three of the LDCs are in Africa, nine in Asia, three in Oceania, and one in the Americas.

Buhari said that he attended the conference on the invitation of Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar. For me, Nigeria was not in good company at the LDC summit. 

There is a Yoruba proverb that comes useful here: “Ai pe ipade osi, ko je ki a mo eni ti baale ise to si.” Roughly translated, it means: ”Without a convocation of the wretched, you can’t determine who can be king of the poor.” Osi, in Yoruba, means abject poverty, or five-star wretchedness, if you like. Is that good company for Nigeria? The president’s rationalisation for his attendance — “Nigeria is here to show solidarity and support to the LDCs in the quest to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, especially in this decade of action, where no one should be left behind”, is simply laughable. The host country, Qatar, just hosted the last edition of the FIFA World Cup. Can Nigeria host the World Cup, or any other global event?

Is Nigeria a G-8 country? Are we the wealthiest? In what area do we have strength to showcase, when the HDI (Human Development Index) of our country is a miserly 0.535, according to the IMF? We can’t even compete with any member of the BRICS bloc. BRICS stands for Brazil, Russian, India, China, and South Africa. If Buhari had done his job as we all expected of him, perhaps that bloc would now be BRINCS, with N standing for Nigeria.

What did Buhari go to do there? Show solidarity with the poor as he said? How well has he managed poverty in his own country? Can Buhari swear that the number of poor people in Nigeria has decreased under his watch? Instead of staying at his desk and see what options exist to take us out of his bungled Naira redesign policy, the president took out scarce foreign exchange on a junket that has no meaning in the life of the ordinary Nigerian. No empathy for us from our leader, beyond rhetorics!