110 million people have no business being poor in Nigeria —NEITI boss

EXECUTIVE Secretary, Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), Mr Waziri Adio, has said that there is no reason for Nigeria to have 110 million people living in poverty.

“With the kind of money Nigeria made from oil in the past decades, there is no reason it should have 110 million poor people,” Adio said during a visit to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja, on Tuesday.

The NEITI boss said the visit was aimed at renewing collaboration between the two organisations to end corruption, impunity and mismanagement in the country’s oil, gas and mining revenues

Adio said for years, Nigeria enjoyed being an oil producing nation and reaped trillions of dollars in oil wealth, yet did not reach all levels in the society due to mismanagement and corrupt practices.

“For too long, our country is used as a symbol for anything that is wrong in terms of countries that are endowed with resources. We want that narrative to change.

“If you recall, countries like Ghana, Kenya and others have also discovered oil and the first thing they do is to say how do we ensure that this resources will not lead us to the situation where Nigeria has been, a situation where natural resources lead to corruption, mismanagement and acute poverty.

“The vice-president recently said that about 110 million Nigerians are poor. With the kind of trillions that we have made from oil, we have no reason to be there.

“We have no reason to have even 10 million Nigerians poor. So we want to change the narrative of Nigeria from the Norways of this world to the UAEs and the Botswana of this world,” he said.