The presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Mr Peter Obi, has said his government will not continue with the ‘handout’ of sharing formula but implement a production formula where every Nigerian would be productive for positive impacts.
Obi, who said this on Friday at a Leadership Townhall held at the University of Abuja, pledged to work hard in pulling people out of poverty.
“The only way to do this is to move your country today from consumption to production. Nigeria can be self-sufficient in food production and change its trajectory of a wasteful economy largely dependent on mere sharing oil revenue when it could actually task the federating units to up their games for the growth of the economy.
“Nigeria is not producing anything. We are in a country today that is wasting everybody’s time on sharing. And we want to remove the sharing formula and replace it with production. We are attacking this country’s production based on factor of employment.
“Nigeria can earn more from agriculture than oil. India can feed itself. India has a population of 1.4 billion people sitting on a land of 3.2million square kilometers. Nigeria lives on 1/3 of India land 923,000sqkm of land. We cannot feed ourselves. It cannot continue,” Obi said.
He insisted that he and his running mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, won’t share any part of Nigeria’s land with any kind of terrorists or bandit groups, adding that any dissident open to discussion would be engaged, but those who would make themselves unavailable would be dealt with.
He said the size of Sambisa forest, which is three times the size of Israel, would be used as farmland as against the security problem, while promising to end fuel subsidy payment, describing same as the racket of corruption.
Speaking earlier, the vice chancellor of the university, Professor Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, explained that the motive of the gathering was to scrutinise those aspiring to govern the country.
