Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Wednesday said that the
All Progressives Congress (APC) led government was working on a credible
plan to get Nigeria out of poverty in spite of limited funds available
to the country.
Osinbajo disclosed this at a town hall meeting tagged: ‘The
Candidates’ organised by the MacArthur Foundation in collaboration with
NTA and DARIA Media in Abuja.
He said that the APC administration was
dealing with poverty in many ways including monthly payment of N5,000 to
the poorest Nigerians, home grown school feeding programme and the
Tradermoni, where market women are given N10,000 each to start business.
“As of 2012 Nigeria had 112 million people
living in extreme poverty. Today Nigeria has about 86 million people
who are poor but it is higher than India.
“From 2010 to 2014 Nigeria
earned the highest revenue in oil. Nigeria earned $383 billion. Poverty
figure went from about 82 million people to about 112 million in 2012.
That is the reason why we have the poverty problem.
“Unfortunately, with all this money we had poverty was not addressed, nothing was done about it.
“In
three years of our own government $94 billion is what we made from oil
revenue compared that to$383 billion, but we started the largest
programme to tackle poverty in the history of this country,’’ he said.
He said that the government was feeding
9.2million children daily under the school feeding programme to address
the issue of malnutrition.
He added that no credible beneficiary could be traced to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) SURE-P Fund.
Osinbajo also said that the APC was
different from the PDP because the APC manifesto was about social
development of the country.
Speaking on the issue of Security, President
Muhammadu Buhari, said that his administration has done a lot in
addressing insecurity , especially the Boko Haram in the North-East.
“When this administration came in Boko
Haram was holding on to 17 local governments in the North-East. At this
moment they are not holding any. They have only resorted to attacking
soft targets.
“The best you can get about this
administration in terms of fighting Boko Haram is that people are being
returned to their various homes, which was not the case before.
He advised the media to do their thorough research on issues related to insecurity.
On the Disability Bill, Buhari said the document had yet to be forwarded to him.