Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of BudgIT, Seun Onigbinde, has urged presidential candidates in the 2023 election to place a high priority on improving the quality of life and entrepreneurial potential of citizens.
Onigbinde said this on Friday while discussing the 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index Survey on Channels Television’s Politics Today.
The National Bureau of Statistics, on Thursday, released the survey which indicated that 130 million Nigerians are poor, representing 63 per cent of the nation’s population..
According to the document, the poverty index is mostly experienced in rural areas, especially in the North with women and children being the most affected.
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Speaking on the campaign promises of candidates, Onigbinde said, first and foremost, they should be serious about building a social contract framework and having every single Nigerian registered on a platform.
He explained the platform enable the government to properly determine who is poor and who is not poor.
“Any economic plan or manifesto that you don’t see a huge element of building a single citizen database, then you know that whatever we are doing will always not be enough.
“The second thing is interrogating their plans on health and primary education systems. Those elements need to be really well defined and I know that this is at the federal level but we all know how the federal government has an overbearing element on most of these things.
“There has to be an integrated way of investing heavily on primary health care systems and primary education systems,” he said.
Another requirement, Onigbinde noted, is a Small and Mid-size Enterprise (SME) framework. He noted that unless government is able to put capital in the hands of small businesses to strengthen entrepreneurship at local or urban levels, efforts to fight poverty are insufficient.
“If anybody does not have a significant target on SME development or semi-development, they can’t say, ‘We are going to tackle poverty.’
“The last thing is social protection. I’ve always been of the belief that no matter how much we try to change all of these things, there will be a segment of the economy that is heavily vulnerable and are susceptible to shocks.
“For example, the flooding that we had recently is going to exacerbate the numbers. Significant people lost their holdings and it’s going to be difficult for them to come back. So, how do you also invest in social protection,” he said.
