ANALYSIS-Extreme inequality in West Africa despite impressive economic growth

Rising inequality is a global trend where the richest are getting disproportionate gains while the people in the lower bracket of the society are getting trapped in poverty. There has been a dramatic rise in the wealth and number of billionaires. There was created a new billionaire created every two days between 2017 and 2018.

The recently released Oxfam report shows this global trend of ever-widening inequality is also reflected in West Africa, a region which has shown impressive economic growth in the last twenty years. In 2018, six of the ten fastest-growing economies of Africa were housed in the region. Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Niger showed remarkable economic growth rates but the benefits went into the pockets of a small number of people while the larger population was left mired in poverty, according to the report. The richer became richer and more powerful whereas the poor found it harder to makes ends meet.

When the growth of the country benefits only a handful of people, it leads to the deterioration of the other social spheres. Consequently, West Africa also has very poor records of public health coverage, access to water and education.

Numbers reflecting extreme inequality

The Oxfam report 2019 shows that the extreme inequality in West Africa can become a crisis if the governments are failing to reduce it. The inequality has reached to such an extreme level that the top one percent of the population possesses more than everyone else combined in the region. It is home to the largest number of countries in Africa but with more than 30 percent of the population living under USD 1.90 a day.

The five richest men of Nigeria own so much wealth that when combined together it exceeds the country's budget of 2017. On the other extreme of the spectrum, about 60 percent of its citizens live on less than USD 1.25 a day, the threshold for absolute poverty.

Inequality is prevalent in public services like education, especially at the intersectionality of class and gender. In Mali, women from rich families are 15 times more likely to have gotten a secondary education as compared to women from poor families. The Oxfam report shows that in the case of Niger 70 percent of the poorest girls have never attended primary school.

In another growing country of the region, Nigeria, women are ten times less likely to have their own farmland although they make between 60 percent and 79 percent of the rural labor force.

The governments of the countries are required to take concrete steps to bridge this dramatically widening gap between the rich and the poor. It is important for a country to have a middles class but the trends of extreme inequality cast a shadow on that. When the government can give tax incentives to multinational companies, it has a duty to pay more attention to the very citizens of the country to enable them having a decent life. The report shows that the tax incentives given to MNCs each year by the West African countries will be enough to build about 100 modern and well-equipped hospitals each year in the region.

(Data inputs from Oxfam report)