
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo during a dinner and Interactive session with Faculty Members, Harvard Business School on Tuesday in Lagos said the problem of extreme poverty in Nigeria gives him sleepless night.
The vice president featured alongside Srikant Datar, Professor of Business Administration (HBS), and Bayo Ogunlesi, a Nigerian investment banker, at a question and answer session moderated by Hakeem Bello-Osagie, Chairman of Metis Capital Partners.
“I think what keeps me up at night has to do with extreme poverty; the issue is that the largest number of those who vote for us are the very poor, Osinbajo said.
“The promises that government makes to them is that their lives will be better and obviously they are looking at their lives being better in the shortest possible time.
“I will like to see Nigeria being an industrialised nation in the next 10 years; a very strong middle class and most people living above poverty line.”
Osinbajo said a lot of government policies were taking into account people at the bottom of the pyramid with a focus on agriculture and getting credit facilities to farmers in order to achieve self-sufficiency.
He said many farmers in the country had been lifted out of poverty by this administration.
A lot of attention had also been given to the Social Intervention Programmes, which factored the provision of cheap credit to petty traders at the bottom of the pyramid, Osinbajo stated.
The vice president told the HBS that Nigeria was open to business with its various potentials and urged Nigerian investors abroad to look homewards.
He said: “If you are going to do business anywhere in Africa, it has to be Nigeria.
“This is where you have the energy, you have the drive.
“We are already seeing that kind of activity.
“Business people will always be driven by profit.
“Talent will always go in the direction where it is best rewarded.
“One can’t afford to be sentimental about that.
“As people see that the environment is getting better for business, they will come back.
“The opportunities for making huge profits are here.
“Practically everything we are doing is to ensure that there is environment for business to thrive.
“People are leaving but people are coming back.”
Osinbajo said the Federal Government, through the Special Economic Zones, was encouraging the manufacturers.
The vice president said the government was looking at natural economic clusters and had set up shared facilities and power.
He said a lot was going on in the agro-allied sector and resolving the power challenges.
“In the next few months, we will unveil a plan that deals with most of the critical issues in the power sector,” he said.

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