110m Nigerians poor, Osinbajo tells AU leaders
The Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, has told African leaders that there are about 110 million poor Nigerians, two-tenth of whom, according to him, are in extreme poverty. He spoke yesterday at a breakfast hosted by Ghanaian President John Mahama on Africa and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ahead of African Union (AU) Summit opening today in Kigali, Rwanda.
Osinbajo, who led the Nigerian delegation to the summit, stressed at the breakfast attended by many presidents and heads of delegations that the whole idea of the Sustainable Development Goals “is really about addressing inequality and poverty.”
He said Nigeria and other African nations should rise up to the urgent need of addressing the problems of poverty and inequality even as the global community focused on its new Sustainable Development Goals.
Osinbajo said: “In Nigeria, in the current budget cycle, we’ve the largest social protection programme in the history of the country. It’s a N500 billion programme worth over $2.5 billion as at the time budget was signed.
“Basically, we are looking at lifting many out of poverty. Of course, many are familiar with the size of the Nigerian state and we have close to 110 million people who are poor, and about two-tenth are in extreme poverty,” he said.
The vice president described poverty as a huge problem in Nigeria , saying that the present administration was looking at how to empower the citizenry and give them what is sustainable.
“For women, we’re doing a programme; micro-credit programme for a million market women and artisans. All would be given facilities, training facilities as well to enable them do some work for themselves and to continue to be able to live. And we think that giving this micro-credit loan to women is to make sure they handle money better and do a much better work on the whole. With what we’ve done already, we’ve seen that they’re certainly going to work. In the case of Conditional Cash Transfer, again, we’re handing these to women. We’re giving this to another million, the poorest of the poor,” he said.
Osinbajo added, “in determining who the poorest is, we had problems on that, but we have very good assistance from the World Bank and the Bill Gates Foundation. They helped in trying to map the really poor.”
“We had to get inside the communities looking for the poorest of the poor with the small sum of money which is about N5,000 (which is roughly about $25 dollars or there about), which is a sum of money that would be given to the poorest every month to enable them feed themselves and find something that they may do and on the condition that they send their children to school and participate in immunisation.
“So, we’re really excited about some of the works we’re trying to do around the SDGs, and we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to get the Social Protection Programme working. We just recently appointed a Senior Special Assistant on SDGs. We also have a full SDG Implementation Office which is fully equipped, and we hope to be able to carry out all of the proposals we made and effect them within the shortest possible time,” he said.