2023: Nigeria cannot have so many people living in poverty and not have criminality- Peter Obi

Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s (LP) presidential candidate, has stated that Nigeria cannot have so many poor people without criminality and banditry.

Obi made the announcement on Monday at the Editors Forum, a project of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE).

He stated that his administration intends to reduce poverty in Nigeria 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.

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.

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.

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.