Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), has said that Nigeria cannot have so many people living in poverty and not have criminality and banditry.
Obi disclosed this on Monday at the Editors Forum, an initiative of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE).
He stated that his administration plans on reducing Nigeria’s poverty rate by focusing on economic productivity.
Peter Obi stated that Nigeria was going through many challenges mainly because it was a consuming instead of a producing country, including unemployment, poverty, criminality, and insecurity.
- “We cannot have that number of people living in poverty and not have criminality, banditry, and so on. We must remove sharing formula and replace it with the production formula,” he said.
- “My commitment is to put Nigeria into production. It is not acceptable that we cannot feed ourselves. We must get the country to work; all it requires is leadership that understands and can drive the process. I can do that,” he said.
Campaign funding: He also noted that nobody has funded his campaign personally.
- “I cannot be talking about being transparent about managing public money without starting with my campaign. “I do not pay people to work with me. Nobody will say he is funding Peter Obi’s campaign. I am funding it myself.
- “All those things happening everywhere is just that people believe in our cause and give whatever it is from their little resources. I am encouraged, and I assure them that they are doing it for the right cause and I will never disappoint them,” he said.
Debt profile: On Nigeria’s debt profile, he said every nation borrows, and individual businesses borrow all over the world, citing that What is important is what we use the borrowed money to do. If you borrow for consumption, that is where we have a problem.
- “I won’t say I will not borrow but I will only borrow for investment and I will explain to Nigerians the need for the borrowing,” he added.
For the record: The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed that 63% of persons living in Nigeria (133 million people) are multidimensionally poor.
This is according to a press statement issued by the NBS on Thursday on the highlight of the result of the 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) Survey.
According to the report, over half of the population of Nigeria is multi-dimensionally poor, with multidimensional poverty higher in rural areas, where 72% of people are poor, compared to 42% of people in urban areas.
