Vice Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Peter Obi, has criticised the way the anti-corruption war has been carried out by the ruling party.
Peter Obi made this challenge while at the Vice Presidential debate which held at the congress hall of the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja
Obi was up against the incumbent, Yemi Osinbajo and he argued that the government is supposed to be able to both handle the economy and fight corruption at the same time.
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“In 2015, unemployment and underemployment was 24%, today it’s 40. In 2015, we were attracting N21 billion in foreign direct investments, we attracted only 12 last year. That means it’s going low. Our GDP was 520 in 2015, and per capital was 2, 500, today it’s under 1, 900. If you look at our stock market, it has lost over N2 trillion in one year,” he said.
“You are not creating jobs, you are not doing the right thing, and you are just fighting corruption. You can’t shut down your shop and be chasing criminals.”
On his part, VP Yemi Osinbajo said that it is impossible for the Government to implement many of the things it wants to if corruption is still the order of the day
“If you allow criminals to steal all the inventories in the shop, there will be no shop,” he said.
“And what has happened in Nigeria in the past 16 years is what the World Bank told us that the major cause of our poverty is corruption. So, let me say that there is no way we can minimise what has happened. You can’t minimise corruption. If you minimise it, we run the risk of completely… in fact the argument is lost. We cannot do what we want to do unless we are able to minimise corruption or eradicate it completely. This is what we are trying do.”
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