Minister of Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, has declared that the recent National Bureau of Statistics NBS recommendations for getting Nigeria out of poverty were already being addressed by the Muhammadu Buhari administration with its massive investment in infrastructure renewal and expansion.
He made this known in Abuja during a meeting with stakeholders’ weekend. The NBS in the report released in November on poverty index had recommended investments in Health, Education and Infrastructure among others as viable means to take the people out of poverty.
But while presiding over the 2022 Ember Month Programme’s Press Briefing of the Ministry, Fashola, who noted that many people had been quoting the Report in terms of the poverty rate, explained to the audience of transport stakeholders who gathered at the Conference Room of the Ministry, “That (Infrastructure) was already happening before the recommendation came. President Buhari had started investing in infrastructure. That is why you and I are here”.
Explaining that poverty has different dimensions including, monetary and multidimensional poverty, the Minister pointed out that the importance of infrastructure lay in the fact that it not only addresses monetary poverty but also multidimensional poverty which, according to him, includes absence of access, choice and efficiency.
“And so for me, why is infrastructure so important? It is addressing poverty, the dimensional and multi-dimensional issues. It provides jobs during construction and it makes life better after construction. And as we have seen, as construction is going on journey time is getting better year-on-year”, he said.
Stating that the Buhari administration “is on the right track” as far as addressing the poverty issues are concerned, the Minister, who noted that results would manifest in due course, added that people who express anxiety over the seeming delay in the results of the investments should commend the administration for investing the nation’s resources for the benefit of the people.
He recalled that there was a time before the present administration when funds were being taken out of the country and also from an agency of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to fund elections in the country, adding, “That was the cause of poverty; if they took away money that would have been used to address issues in the country, that is the cause of poverty”.
“NNPC is now investing N651 billion in road construction but that was the money some people used to fund electioneering campaigns and provide cars for friends in the past. Buhari has put back the money where it belongs. These are things that are heading in the right direction”, Fashola said.
The Minister declared, “When there is a problem it takes time to design a solution and when you apply the solution it takes time to get the final results. But ours is past the design stage because we are already seeing the results”, adding that if people who were saying it took them days to travel to a destination are now saying it takes them a few hours to make the same destination, “it means we are heading in the right direction”.
“The other point I want to make is to say that no opposition or adversary of this government can take the credit of our investment in infrastructure away. When all other funding avenues fell, this government found other funding sources. So, we now talk of the SUKUK; we are now talking about the Road Infrastructure Tax Credit Scheme, we are now talking about the Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund”, he said.
