Nigerian Leaders Lacks Basic Economic Ideas, Sowore Tackles Buhari,Others

Abubakar Y.Ojimaojo

The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, AAC, Omoyele Sowore, Tuesday, said that Nigeria’s past and present leaders have performed poorly on economic development, stating that the country has been governed by leaders who are ignorant of basic economics.

This is even as he maintained that one of the reasons Nigeria is bedeviled with a myriad of economic challenges, is hinged on the fact that Nigerians have not learned from electing incompetent leaders.

He said this during a seminar with the theme: “AEMAinspire University Tour Seminar”, organized by the African Economic Merit Awards, AEMA, in Abuja.

According to him, I will be exaggerating if I say that Nigeria has an economy right now. We don’t have an economy, we just have a vulcanizer economy where people are just patching along.

“You know, the debt to GDP ratio is unbelievable. We are borrowing to pay salaries at this point. People can’t feed. There are no hospitals and the security situation is so bad. Even our oil that we so much talk about, we’re exporting more than half of what typically should go up because of the security.

“Most importantly, we don’t have a leader that understands how to turn things around and to turn them around, I have identified areas that must be immediately taken care of.

“One of them is that you cannot have an economic base without electricity. You don’t need to go to school to know that for you to kickstart your economy, you must have in place an energy production rate that will be able to power both big and small businesses.

“We also have to deal with security of course, and then clean up the system corruption is still a major problem, but I’m not going to tell you that even if we save all the money from the corrupt snakes, and monkeys that are raiding our economy, that will have enough except we go into high-level production mode.

Earlier, the Convener, AEMA, McEva Temofe, while bemoaning the state of the nation’s economy stated that it is unfavorable for the youths.

He said that AEMA is poised to advocate for youth inclusion in the country’s economy through its series of developmental programs.

He said: “We’re much into developmental programs. We will be going to different universities to inspire younger ones to pursue more of their career in entrepreneurship bringing together people from the agro-industry, the tech industry, and other industries as well, to use the voice to inspire these people, and for them to be huge contributors in the Nigerian economy and Africa as a whole.”