Peter Obi, a presidential contender for the Labour Party, has bemoaned the nation’s rising poverty rate.
According to a recent National Multidimensional Poverty Index Report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), at least 63 percent of Nigerians today experience extreme poverty as a result of limited access to medical, educational, and employment opportunities.
With 56,610 people from 109 senatorial districts across the 36 states of the union being sampled, it was the largest poll ever conducted in the nation.
Obi, who addressed the report in a post on his Facebook page on Friday, attributed the situation to a pattern of poor leadership.
In the elections in 2023, the former governor of Anambra State urged Nigerians to reject leaders who would mismanage the nation’s wealth out of greed.
He wrote: “The trending of multidimensional poverty if not arrested immediately will damage state capacity and effectiveness and therefore disarray economic and social policies that will reverse the trend in the future.
“If we combine atrocious fiscal decline with grand and pervasive corruption and the level of incompetence of public leadership to such generalized poverty, we will end up a completely collapsed state, thrown back to state of nature.
“How on earth is it that 63 percent of Nigerians do not have access to the most basic sanitation and nutrition? How come 63 percent of our citizens cannot approach a clinic or health center within two hours?
“It is now time to end politics as usual, time to disband the army of greedy and self-serving politicians in Abuja and elect those who are connected to the people and those who share the pains and deprivations of the working and unemployed youths, abandoned women and deprived children across Nigeria.
“I will disrupt this trajectory of failure and wickedness in high places across Nigeria and give Nigerians back their country so that every child will have access to good schools, good drinking water, good sanitation, good health care, and their parents good jobs and the joy of being a citizen of a country that is lifting millions from poverty into shared prosperity.
“If China lifted 750 million from poverty in about 20 years and if India reduced poverty from 50 percent to 20 percent in about 15 years, we could do even better.
“We can wipe off multidimensional poverty in less than a decade. Let’s do it together, let us end the corruption and incompetence with our votes.”
