THE Candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the February 16 presidential election, Alhaji Atiku Abubaka, has reiterated his conviction in the supremacy of a private sector ability in creating jobs and growing the economy.
This he said he would achieve by lowering corporate taxes, improving power supply, providing security and generally increasing the ease of doing business.
“We are also going to reduce corporate tax because when you do that, you give incentive to investors to come in and invest and when they invest, they create jobs and when those jobs are created, the people who get employed also pay taxes.
“So in all cases where you implement lower corporate taxation, we have seen GDP rising”, he said during a live television interview programme on Wednesday where he featured jointly with his vice presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi.
The former vice president who said though refused to disclose how much he and his companies paid in taxes in 2018 however declared it to be “a huge amount of money.”
ALSO READ; Cowbellpedia grand winner to go home with N2m
Atiku said the economy must be driven by the private sector in order to curb corruption, avoid nepotism saying that in fighting corruption, “prevention is better than cure.
“We can prevent and also cure corruption at the same time: preventive measures and punitive measures.”
He also promised to introduce technology in the public service and even in the private sector so that relationship between members of the public and government is not personal.
The businessman explained that Nigeria requires a leadership that is pro-business and pro-private sector “so that we can get out of this mess we have found ourselves.
“Right now, the middle class is completely eliminated and you have to have a middle class before you can lift the ones at the bottom.
“One of our major plans is to create jobs and the greatest job creation sector in this country is agriculture.
“Our policy seeks to empower the farmer to be more commercially oriented and where they cannot, we have a system that will support them.”
He spoke of his plans to empower micro, medium small enterprises, which are the greatest creators of employment in developed economies.
“A few years ago, I set up a microfinance bank. I brought in somebody from Bangladesh and I told him of my ambition to move families out of poverty and I want to dedicate 80 percent of your loans to women.
“Through that, we have moved 45,000 families out of poverty.
ALSO READ: Oyo civil servants will get salary by 25th every month – Ayandele says
Atiku Abubakar however, admitted some mistakes in some of the reform programmes that he supervised while he was Vice President and Chairman of National Council on Privatisation.
“In any policy that you implement, there are bound to be some mistakes but if overall, if you look at the reforms of our government especially the privatisation policy, you will find out that it is a huge success.”
He cited the example of the Universal Basic Education Act which some states and local government councils have exploited to fleece the people rather than implement free education in primary and secondary school levels.
“Going through the legislation again, I discovered that we made a mistake. We did not include the clause to penalise any level of government if they fail to implement free education.
“If I have another opportunity, I will return the law to the National Assembly to insert the penalty clause such that where a state or local government is given money to invest in public education and it decides not to do so, we should deduct such monies directly from their share of federation account and directly intervene in the education of children under such jurisdictions.
and then