The Convener of Red Card Movement, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, has criticised the Federal Government for failing to come up with the right economic policies that plunged Nigeria into recession in 2014.
She stated this on Monday when featuring as a guest on Channels Television’s breakfast show, Sunrise Daily in Abuja, the nation’s capital.
“If you did the right economic policies at that time, you would have averted the recession.”
Ezekwesili, who is also a former Vice President of World Bank and a former Minister of Education said Nigeria did not act fast like some other oil-producing countries.
While giving an assessment of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration three years into office, she added, “Much other oil producing and exporting countries managed to avert the recession.”
The former Education Minister said that although the recession era is over, its effect is still being felt by the citizenry.
One of the effects, she stated, was the prevailing level of poverty most Nigerians were subjected to, just as the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) put the poverty level at 60 percent.
“It (recession) costs us considerably huge effect on the populace. The truth is that we don’t yet have poverty number from the NBS. When you have the kind of shock that the combination of oil shock collapse and poor economic response to it occasioned, you would have dropped many more of your citizens into poverty.
“Considering the last data that we know of poverty rate from the NBS it is something in the neighbourhood of 60 percent, hundreds of millions of your citizens are poor. You don’t want to take any economic activity that would improve those numbers because that is disastrous,” she stated.
Ezekwesili also advised the Federal Government to initiate good economic policies that would attract investors into the country.
In doing that, she explained, the government needs to build confidence both in the minds of marketers, investors and consumers.
As the nation marks the democracy day celebrations on Tuesday (tomorrow), Nigerians expect better opportunities in terms of job creation, secured atmosphere, good health care delivery system, among several others.
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