Nigeria’s Vice-President, Yemi Osinbajo , has said that the extreme poverty in Africa’s most populous nation keeps him up at night.
Naijaparry reports that the nation’s number two citizen made this known at a dinner and Interactive Session with Faculty Members, Harvard Business School (HBS) on Tuesday in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial center.
“I think what keeps me up at night has to do with extreme poverty; the issue is that the largest number of those who vote for us are the very poor,” Osinbajo said at the interactive session.
“The promises that government makes to them is that their lives will be better and obviously they are looking at their lives being better in the shortest possible time.
“I will like to see Nigeria being an industrialised nation in the next 10 years; a very strong middle class and most people living above poverty line.’’
According to him, many government policies were taking into account people at the bottom of the pyramid with a focus on agriculture and getting credit facilities to farmers in order to achieve self sufficiency.
On what this government has achieved, Osinbajo said that many farmers in the country had been lifted out of poverty by this administration.
According to him, a lot of attention had also been given to the Social Intervention Programmes (SIPs) which factored the provision of cheap credit to petty traders at the bottom of the pyramid.
“If you are going to do business anywhere in Africa, it has to be Nigeria,” he told the HBS.
“This is where you have the energy; you have the drive.
“We are already seeing that kind of activity; business people will always be driven by profit.
“Talent will always go in the direction where it is best rewarded; one can’t afford to be sentimental about that.
“As people see that the environment is getting better for business, they will come back; the opportunities for making huge profits are here.
“Practically everything we are doing in to ensure that there is environment for business to thrive. People are leaving but people are coming back.”
