Focus on reducing poverty, not 2023 elections, Obi tells fellow politicians

Former Anambra State Governor, Peter Obi, said on Sunday that Nigerian political leaders should focus their attention on how to formulate feasible fiscal policies that would pull their people out of poverty rather than strategising for 2023 elections.

Obi, featuring on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics., said the 2023 elections have no direct and immediate impact on people’s current livelihoods, which have been put in dire circumstances by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Every other country is discussing the recession and how to pull their people out of poverty,”, said the People’s Democratic Party, PDP’s Vice-Presidential candidate in the 2019 poll.

He added, “So what we should do now is to concentrate on the monetary and fiscal policies to start pulling people out of poverty.

“If you see what happened with recent protests, you could see that we are heading into a problem. And I want our energy to be concentrated in that problem. The politicians, the class where I belong, should do more seriously, across party lines, to be able to arrest the situation before it gets out of hand.

“For me, it is in discussing how do we put food on people’s table. Elections will come and we can see how to select the best. But let’s deal with the recession we have just entered before 2023.”

Obi lambasted the current administration over its propensity to borrow for corruption and inability to cut government expenses.

“The cost of governance is not acceptable,” he said. “There is too much waste.

“This recession is going to be worse than in 2016 because the monies we borrowed then were not properly invested.

“What we need now is to go into a vigorous regime of formulating implementable and measurable monetary and fiscal policies to drive ourselves out of the present situation.”

Obi noted that Nigerian leaders now “need to take very difficult decisions” if they are to turn the tide and put the economy back on the track of positive growth.