Former Vice President, Osibanjo spokesperson, Laolu Akande said the increasing rate of poverty in the country has become a crisis that the Federal Government must tackle headlong.
Akande described the poverty gap in the country as “tremendous,” saying people would always find stiff resistance to government spending whether it is justified or not.
The former presidential spokesperson was reacting to the ongoing outrage by many Nigerians over what they perceive as exorbitant and questionable expenditures by the Lagos State Government and Nigeria’s controversial N2.8 trillion 2023 supplementary budget recently passed by the Senate.
Akande said the tremendous rate of the poverty problem in the country is partly responsible for the distrust among Nigerians towards the government spendings.
He said, “I want to say two things, number one if you look at the fact that people are now paying attention, there is a greater focus, especially on what is happening in the state, in terms of the budget. That is a good thing.”
“The level of transparency has increased, so, there is more attention that is focused on it. We expect that the governors will begin to also modify. You are going to see that because once these issues are been aired publicly, it will increase the level of their responsibilities. I expect that. That is a good thing.
“The other important point I want to emphasize is that the poverty gap in our country is so tremendous that the ordinary people cannot imagine the kind of money that has been spent on certain aspects of governance.
“Look, the truth of the matter is that governance is costly. And we can have that discussion in terms of what has to be done to reduce the cost of governance.
“If you’re going to have the government do their work, there is going to be a lot of expenses indeed. But the kind of poverty that we have in our society does not allow people to even begin to imagine even if some of these figures were moderate.
“Now I will say there is a lot of excesses without a doubt, there are things that have been cut off. But we need to deal with the issue of poverty. Poor people cannot reason that you need this amount of money. A billion in our budget comes to even just one per cent but you cannot tell that to a poor man.”
