TheCable

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo says oil revenue earned between 2010 and 2014 was not judiciously used, hence Nigeria’s status as the country with the highest number of people living in extreme poverty.

Osinbajo said the federal government is working on a plan to get Nigeria out of poverty in spite of limited funds.

The VP disclosed this on Wednesday at a town hall meeting tagged ‘The Candidates’.

He said the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration was dealing with poverty in many ways including monthly payment of N5,000 to the poorest Nigerians, home grown school feeding programme and Tradermoni, where market women are given N10,000 each to start a business.

“As of 2012 Nigeria had 112 million people living in extreme poverty. Today Nigeria has about 86 million people who are poor but it is higher than India,” he said.

“From 2010 to 2014 Nigeria earned the highest revenue in oil. Nigeria earned $383 billion. Poverty figure went from about 82 million people to about 112 million in 2012. That is the reason why we have the poverty problem.

“Unfortunately, with all this money we had poverty was not addressed, nothing was done about it.

“In three years of our own government $94 billion is what we made from oil revenue compared that to$383 billion, but we started the largest programme to tackle poverty in the history of this country.”

He said the government was feeding 9.2 million children daily under the school feeding programme to address the issue of malnutrition.

He added that no credible beneficiary could be traced to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) SURE-P Fund.

Osinbajo also said the APC is different from the PDP because the APC manifesto is about social development of the country.