Adopt China’s TPA Model To Alleviate Poverty, Hunger, and Underdevelopment In Nigeria, FG Told

Adopt China’s TPA Model To Alleviate Poverty, Hunger, and Underdevelopment In Nigeria, FG Told

By Prince Benson Davies

Nigerians who visited China recently to attend a seminar on poverty reduction have urged the Federal Government to experiment with China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) model to combat extreme hunger, deprivation and want in the West African country
It would be recalled that the participants, drawn from about eight countries in Africa and other continents, included the National Secretary of the New Nigeria People Party (NNPP), Mr. Dipo Olayoku and officials of the Nigerian Ministry of Poverty Alleviation, to study China’s model of fighting poverty, which took over 700 million Chinese out of abject poverty within 42 years.
The program, tagged: Seminar on Capacity Building in Poverty Reduction of Small and Medium Enterprises and NGOs for Developing Countries, had representatives from Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Lesotho, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka and Jordan, among others, in attendance.
The two-week seminar was designed to equip participants with knowledge of how China could use agriculture to reduce hunger and absolute poverty in a country of over one billion people.
Following the success of the programme, Nigerians have urged the Federal Government to adopt the Chinese model to alleviate poverty in the country
China’s Poverty Reduction Project, which began in 1978, was aimed at ensuring that no Chinese lacked the necessities of life like food, clothing and shelter at any time, while also providing adequate education and employment opportunities for all the citizens.
The whole package under the People’s Republic of China’s Poverty Reduction Project is to ensure massive industrialization with specific industries located where the raw materials in the form of agricultural produce to service such industries are abundantly being cultivated.
The tour of China by the participants at the Poverty Reduction Seminar took them to Beijing, the capital of China, and some autonomous provinces like Guangxi.
Its success on February 25, 2021, was tagged as the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history. On that date, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people, culminating in a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949.

The early decades of socialist construction laid the foundation that was deepened during the reform and opening-up periods. During the period, 850 million Chinese people were lifted out of extreme poverty; that is to say, 70 per cent of the world’s total poverty reduction happened in China.

In the most recent ‘targeted’ phase that began in 2013, the Chinese government spent 1.6 trillion yuan (an equivalent of $246 billion) to build 1.1 million kilometres of rural roads, bring internet access to 98 per cent of the country’s poor villages, renovate homes for 25.68 million people, and build new homes for 9.6 million others.

Since 2013, millions of people, state-owned and private enterprises, and broad sectors of society have been mobilised to ensure that, despite the pandemic, China’s remaining 98.99 million people from 832 counties and 128,000 villages exit absolute poverty.
In 2019, as China entered the last stages of its poverty eradication scheme, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, ‘Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the speed of change and progress. You have created one of the most dynamic economies in the world while helping more than 800 million people lift themselves out of poverty—the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.
“While China has been fighting poverty, the rest of the world, especially the Global South, has experienced a downward turn. United Nations agencies report a great reversal in poverty elimination outside China: in 2020, over 71 million people—most of whom are in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia—slipped back into poverty, marking the first global poverty increase since 1998.

It is estimated that the economic crisis accelerated by the pandemic will drive a total of 251 million people into extreme poverty by 2030, bringing the total to 322 million.”

The concept of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) strategy was first mooted by Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to combat poverty in China.
It played into China’s poverty alleviation strategy and contributed to the Party’s century goal of “comprehensively building a “moderately prosperous society,” which is the first objective of Xi Jinping’s agenda of the Four Comprehensives.

Speaking of the strategy, Xi Jinping stressed that without resolving the poverty problem in rural areas, it would be impossible for China to become a moderately prosperous country.
The TPA strategy was officially adopted by the Chinese government in 2014. The Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, said in his government report in March 2014: “Local governments need to merge poverty alleviation resources and take targeted measures to ensure that assistance reaches poverty-stricken villages and households.

Moiliere once said, “Je vis de bon soupe et non de bon langage” (it’s good food and not fine words that keep me alive). What our long-suffering masses need is good food. They have had a surplus of fine words.
“We have been tutored to accept that ours is not a unique situation, that we are part of a global recession, and that there is a general degradation of third-world economies, yet the fact remains that all over the world, there are countries that produce less, have fewer resources, and owe more than Nigeria.
“Yet, their citizens enjoy a much higher standard of living and a higher quality of life; such countries, though subject to periodic economic dialysis by the very same creditors, have never been humiliated by being paraded before the bars of clubs playing blind man-bluff with creditors intention of exacting their pound of flesh,” the participants said.
Wondering how much longer Nigeria will continue to maintain its indifferent posture in the face of glaring economic injustices, they said: “Our efforts to halt our national economic decline have become fixated on the level of tokenism and cynical symbolism; we have over the years opted for a philosophy of change, the habit of tabularizing with its concomitant nihilism.
“Each year, the future looks even more bleak; the rich get fewer and fewer, the poor get more destitute, and sooner or later, the dispossessed of the land will balk at a life that has become an intolerable burden if we fail to heed the warning implicit in today’s tension. Therefore, we owe to ourselves a duty to pressure and gird our loins for the inevitable confrontation.”