The Politics of Poverty: Herbert Daniel Gomagallah on Why Nigeria’s Poor Are Kept Poor

On a rainy afternoon in Jos, the Plateau State capital, Herbert Daniel Gomagallah leans forward in his chair, his tone quiet but assured. He is not an easy man to interrupt. “It was my poverty that inspired me,” he says simply. Not policy papers, not lectures, not the abstractions of development jargon, not even his various degrees in economics and policy, but the gnawing emptiness of growing up in a place where deprivation is the rule, not the exception.

“It is beyond the poverty of the mind and resources; it is a multidimensional one,” he adds. 

Herbert’s new book, We Need You Poor So That We Can Rule, has a title that sounds almost mischievous. But Herbert insists there is nothing tongue-in-cheek about it. The argument is devastatingly straightforward: poverty is not a mistake of governance; it is a deliberate political instrument.

Herbert’s words land heavily in a country where nearly 133 million people, over 60 per cent of the population, are classified as multidimensionally poor. Yet he is less interested in the figures than in the design behind them. Poverty, he argues, is cultivated and maintained because it guarantees dependency. Politicians build loyalty not through policy reform but through scarcity, ensuring that food bags, fertiliser coupons, or token cash transfers become the coin of political exchange.

It is a bleak analysis, but Herbert delivers it with the precision of someone who has not only studied the system but lived inside it. Growing up in Plateau State, he watched neighbours clutch at promises of jobs or scholarships that never materialised. He remembers the hush of families waiting for a visiting politician, the sudden eruption of praise songs when rice and wrappers were distributed, and the silence afterwards when hunger returned.

“There’s poverty in the land,” he tells Joey Off-Air, “but to the political manipulator, he is excited because as long as you can beg, there is a tool to use.”

Herbert is not the first Nigerian writer to use words as a weapon against political rot. But unlike the polemics of the 1980s, his approach relies heavily on satire. The book is sprinkled with biting irony, mocking the very politicians it indicts. He argues that laughter can be disarming, a way of forcing readers to confront uncomfortable truths without turning away.

“I love to talk in parables,” Herbert says. “And it is also safer to avoid name-calling.”

Yet Herbert knows his analysis will not please everyone. Nigeria’s political class is famously thin-skinned, and satire often provokes swift backlash. This is where Herbert’s book strikes hardest: in its insistence that poverty is not an unfortunate outcome but an architecture, one upheld by complicity as much as by direct exploitation.

Still, Herbert resists the temptation to be seen as merely a prophet of despair. He insists there are cracks in the system. Civil society movements, youth protests, and even some religious initiatives have begun to frame poverty not just as a humanitarian crisis but as a political question. His disruption, for now, is through words. But he hopes the book sparks conversations that move beyond diagnosis to action, demanding accountability, reshaping the social contract, and rejecting the manipulation of hunger as a tool of control.

“It is a wake-up call for all of us to go beyond the hashtags,” he says. 

Herbert’s book may not topple regimes, but it opens a conversation too long avoided: that poverty is not just the absence of wealth but the presence of deliberate design. In laying bare this uncomfortable truth, he insists that Nigerians must refuse to be instruments in the machinery of their oppression.

You can grab a hardcopy here : https://selar.com/b1l534