By Ahmed Idris
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said on Monday that nobody would ever find President Muhammadu Buhari and him deceiving Nigerians, stressing that the present administration would continue to carry out programmes that would improve the lives of the citizenry.
The Vice President said this when he featured on Brekete Family, a reality radio talk magazine programme being anchored by Human Rights Radio in Abuja.
“The focus of our government is on how things can be better for the common man. We are not in the business of trying to deceive Nigerians. You can accuse myself and the President of anything, but you will never find us deceiving Nigerians,” he said.
While making references to the present administration’s National Social Investment Programme (N-SIP), Osinbajo said the federal government was able to do so much more with less resources.
He said: “The President has ensured that nobody steals money from the treasury. The major problem Nigeria had before now was the fact that people stole from the nation’s coffers. Once the country is able to stop corruption, it would be better.
“The first thing we did was tackle unemployment by employing young men and women through the N-Power job scheme, which has so far employed 500,000 young graduates.
“Every state has N-Power, noting that there are plans to employ more because of the number of graduates. This is a social safety net for young unemployed Nigerian graduates.
“So far, we have given about 400,000 MarketMoni loans, but the target is to give one million loans to artisans and traders, while TraderMoni loans is a N10,000 interest-free loans to petty traders, of which two million are expected to be reached in the first phase.”
The Vice President also highlighted federal government’s Energizing Economies Initiative which provides clean, affordable and constant power to economic clusters such as big markets and Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) across the country.
“Power is a major problem in Nigeria and our efforts is to solve this through alternative energy such as solar power. We are not relying on the national grid alone. We are also encouraging the private sector to provide power. The new strategy of the government is to put power in different places so as to make life easy for Nigerians without relying on the national grid. We are still working on the national grid. This country is very big, that’s why we have to decentralize,” he said.
