The 2023 presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, has highlighted the impact of corruption and leadership failure on Nigeria’s youthful population in his message commemorating World Population Day.
In a post on his official X handle, Obi emphasized the significance of addressing key issues to harness Nigeria’s population for national development.
He pointed out that as the most populous country in Africa and the sixth most populous in the world, Nigeria is blessed with abundant human resources.
Obi emphasis that investments in health, education, and poverty alleviation are essential for transforming and developing the country.
Obi’s words: “Today, we join the global community in commemorating World Population Day. It is a day that reminds us all of the need to address very germane issues of harnessing our population to engender development in the nation.
“As the most populous country in Africa and the 6th most populous country in the world, Nigeria remains blessed in human resources, which when fully explored through investments in the 3 most critical areas of human development: health, education and fighting poverty, the country will experience tremendous transformation and development.
“In Nigeria today, with more than half of the population falling within the productive age bracket of 15 to 64 years, we are reported to have the highest youth population in the world.
“However, challenges of leadership failure have continued to keep our teeming youthful population unproductive, thereby slowing our journey from consumption to production.
“Because we the leaders have not shown commitment to investing in health, education and supporting MSMEs, poverty, crime, unemployment, and inflation, have all remained on the increase while life expectancy, literacy rate, and per capita income have remained on the decrease.
“This day, therefore, provides us with the opportunity to review our population issues about development and see how to leverage our huge population, especially the youths, to drive development throughout the nation.
“This we can do by prioritizing their health, and education and supporting their small businesses. By so doing, we will not just have a huge population, but we will take pride in our productive population contributing, in many ways, to the development of the nation,” he added.
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