By Angela Atabo
Mr Dumebi Kachikwu, Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) has pledged to revamp the economy, provide jobs and tackle poverty if elected president.
Kachikwu made this known when he featured at the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) Forum in Abuja .
”There is need to take these measures to tackle the rising poverty index and empower Nigerians to be economically stable .
“I must redefine what the nation must do to support our weak, poor and helpless.
“What we can do is to provide social support infrastructure to help these people. We must build an economy that will ensure that these people do not fall into that poverty bracket.
” I tell you this, the greatest assets of the Nigerian nation are the people. If you look at developed nations, because they understand that their people are their greatest asset, what do they do?
“They ensure that their people thrive because only when a people thrive can they contribute meaningfully to the economy of a nation.
“The 60 million odd Nigerians who are not working right now. Unemployed. Imagine if those people were gainfully employed and they’re contributing N5,000 each in taxes to the coffers of our nation.
” Can you imagine what that will do for our nation? So we need to support our people to get back to work.
” If you look at countries around us like the Republic of Benin, Ghana, Niger and others, they are sending what we call low-skilled workers to Nigeria. These people come from other nations to work and we employ them before we employ Nigerians because we see their skill sets as better?
“We need to start activating our technical schools. We need to start retraining and retooling our people in that segment, so we can start exporting workforce to the rest of Africa. ”
Kachikwu said that there was need to start understanding that in an import dependent economy, the greatest threat to citizens and economic survival remained the ports .
“We still have close to 10 billion Naira of the fraud and corruption going on there, that translates to the inflation you see in the economy.
“Imagine most of our relations, who say they want to do business ,someone wants to bring in a container of hair.
“Before you finish, you know that someone will take a bribe of three to five million for that container, imagine how that translates into inflation in the final cost?
“We must take away all these things that militate against business so that we can start making business work for those who are involved in business.”
Kachikwu said that he would build infrastructure platforms and ensure afford internet where people could stay in the comfort of their homes and sell their services to other parts of the world.
He said citizens would not have to work for anyone ,all they need was good internet access.
“Internet access is a privilege and not a righ’,. as president of Nigeria, I will ensure that Nigerians have Affordable Internet access as a right in the year 2023,”he said (NAN)
