Nigeria’s Poverty Levels Worsen Under Buhari – Ezekwesili

A former Minister of Education and presidential candidate of Allied Congress Party of Nigeria, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, on Friday said that poverty levels in Nigeria have reached alarming proportions under the Buhari administration.

She described President Muhammadu Buhari as incompetent, saying that is why he rewards incompetency by keeping his incompetent appointees in office.

“We have seen serial failures in this administration. The President rewards incompetency and I am not surprised because the President himself is incompetent but does not realise it. What he does is to extend their stay in offices in which they have failed. We have seen it with the military. We have seen it with the police.

“My greatest shock and one of my triggers for deciding to run for election, not being a politician as you all know, is that the debasement of the Nigerian life is the final straw that can turn us into a society of anarchy. For it to be that children will grow up in this society and just come to the understanding that killing a person is a normal thing; you know, you can just do it, there is no consequence. My goodness! What kind of impunity is that? That is a dangerous level of impunity.

“For me, I want to be the President of this country and be an effective commander-in-chief of our armed forces on the basis of competence, capacity and character. I would so do that work well that the life of a Nigerian would be the epicentre of our development process. It has implications. It means that in terms of security, we would run the most efficient security system.

She said as President her government “Would reform the security infrastructure of the country. We would find those brilliant ones in our military establishment that have been hidden away in an era of incompetency and low productivity. We would also reform the systems within the military because when we look at the military anywhere, they are the basis of what is called management by objective. And that idea is that when resources are made available, resources should lead to performance.