2023: I Will Reduce Unemployment By 50% In My First Year, Kola Abiola Vows

The Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) presidential candidate, Kola Abiola has said if elected in the 2023 polls, he will reduce the country’s unemployment rate by half.

The latest figures by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) put Nigeria’s unemployment rate at 33.3 percent as of the fourth quarter of 2020.

Abiola, who spoke on Friday during a live appearance on Channels Television’s Politics Today, said he would prioritise sustainable growth and distribution to bolster the nation’s economy.

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“I’m going to start it from day one,” he said. “In the first year, we would definitely halve the unemployment numbers. It’s all about sustainable growth and creating an economy. And we are going to do some things that require that we distribute.

“We’re going to run a market-based economy to create liquidity first. And that liquidity does not mean that the government doesn’t step in from time to time.”

According to him, Nigeria needs a marshal plan, including infrastructural development to increase blue-collar jobs as well as the white-collar jobs.

“We need to go back to agriculture; we need to do it right. We need to make sure that all our river basins come to serve and do what they should do.

“We need to make sure that agric is not just crops, but value added. We need to get our science and technology to add value to our produce,” he said.

Speaking on the complexity of the country’s oil and gas sector, Abiola described it as a “double whammy.”

He listed some of the issues to tackle in the sector to include leakages, corruption, and low production.

“We need to at least produce a million barrels a day to make the numbers work. We’ve worked it out and with that, we need to stop domestic production. We need to make sure that we get the value added from our oil.

“After 63 years of crude production, we’re still importing products? And all we do is export? It will be stopped,” he said.

Responding to the Federal Government’s plans to remove subsidy by June 2023, Abiola accused the Muhammadu Buhari administration of kicking the can down the road, saying if it was willing to execute the plan, it would do so with immediate effect.