JORAS - Nigerian Journal of Religion and Society

Nigerians used to enjoy a very high rate of societal communication and well being through a vibrant living situation comprising of high business activities by individuals, massive transportation of people and goods across her land with much bustling and sights of people attending various occasions and association meetings until about half a decade ago. Nowadays, most of the activities that had other benefits but also enhanced much societal communication have witnessed an unprecedented decrease in occurrence and scope occasioned by insecurity in various forms and dimensions, bad governance and massive corruption with the looting of public funds resulting in a severe economic crisis, unemployment, massive relocation of Nigerians to other countries, poverty, killings, depression, suicide, stampede, and many more ills that have compelled majority of the citizens being affected to come up with several self?survival strategies including the reduction or total withdrawal of their membership of informal associations which before now they patronised a lot for their pleasure, fraternisation, to give back to society, for solace, moral or financial support, personal growth and a lot more benefits because subscribing to associations has now become unaffordable. The concern of this presentation, therefore, is to shade some light on the ugly development and to look into the ways by which associations, since government seems unperturbed, could revise particularly the rising poverty by engaging the description research design to obtain secondary data with personal discussion and observation. The conclusion here is that the associations to which people in society belong, being closer to them than government should step into the ailing situation with some measures against government's seeming unwillingness to alleviate the suffering and death of the poor masses while the recommendations put up include, the establishment of cooperative societies by associations in order to empower their members, training of their members to cultivate fruits, crops and vegetables at home, mobilising the unemployed among their members to acquire skills and urging members to patronise those with goods and services

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