GOVERNOR of Imo State Hope Uzodinma has claimed that politicians are sponsoring banditry in Nigeria to bring down the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
Uzodinma said this on Friday while addressing journalists following a closed-door meeting with Buhari at the Aso Villa.
He also challenged security operatives in the country to make the names of the politicians available to the press.
“What people are doing is to sponsor crisis to the extent that those funding banditry are politicians and I challenge and call on the security agencies to make their names available to the press because what they want to do is to distract a government that is focused,” Uzodinma said.
“This country is blessed by God. From 2015 to date, I thought what the problem would be people saying there is no job creation, that people are not feeding, that salaries are not being paid, that infrastructure is going down, that social interventions are not approved by the government, but these things are available,” the governor said.
However, Uzodinma’s position does not totally reflect the reality of Nigeria and Nigerians.
Although social interventions are being approved and there are traces of infrastructural development across the country, Nigeria’s unemployment is rising and salaries are being owed.
Earlier in March, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had revealed that one in three Nigerians is now without a job.
According to the report, titled ‘Labour Force Statistics, Unemployment and Under Employment – Q4 2020’ 33.3 percent of the current population of Nigeria are unemployed.
Moreover, unemployment has risen by nearly 400 percent since 2015, spiking from 6.75 percent in the third quarter of 2015 to 33.3 percent in the last quarter in 2020.
This shows that poverty is escalating in Africa’s most populous nation with 98 million out of 200 million in multidimensional poverty.
Multidimensional poverty encapsulates deprivations in many dimensions, including lack of education and job, poor quality of work and threat of violence, according to Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.
Lukman Abolade is an Investigative reporter with The ICIR. Reach out to him via labolade@icirnigeria.org, on twitter @AboladeLAA and FB @Correction94