110 million Nigerians are poor, says Osinbajo

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Wednesday said statistics available to him showed that 110 million Nigerians are poor.

This, he said, represented two-third of the country’s population.

Osinbajo spoke while granting audience to members of the Alumni Association of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies led by their President, Maj. Gen. Lawrence Onoja (retd.), at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

The Vice President expressed concern over what he called extreme poverty in some parts of the country.

“When you look at the economic and social policies, and you look at the level of illiteracy in some parts of the country, some are extremely bad and some with cases of about 80 per cent or 90 per cent of children out of school, and other cases of unimaginable decayed infrastructure,” he said.

Osinbajo also claimed that some of the past polices and planning including budgeting of government did not reflect the needs and the conditions of the majority of the people.

He said past planning, policy formulation and budgets were not accountable to the people.

The Vice President challenged his guests to come up with solutions on how to formulate policies that would impact positively on the lives of the people.

Earlier, Onoja had declared the group’s support for the ongoing anti-corruption war of the present administration.

He urged President Muhammadu Buhari not to stop at recovering looted funds but to ensure that looters were jailed.