Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said that the All Progressives Congress (APC) led government is working on a credible plan to get Nigeria out of poverty in spite of limited funds available to the country.
Yemi Osinbajo said this during a town hall meeting in Abuja on Wednesday, Januar 16, 2019.
According to him, the APC administration is 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 a business. He said:
“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 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 that the government was feeding 9.2million children daily under the school feeding programme to address the issue of malnutrition.