Nigeria not a producing country, Peter Obi laments

The presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, has lamented that Nigeria is not a producing but a consuming country.

He also lamented the wide gap between the leaders and workers in Nigeria, saying they must now sit at the same table.

The former governor of Anambra State said this when he met with the leadership of the Nigeria Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress on Tuesday.

According to him, “My commitment is to move Nigeria from consumption to production and you can’t talk about production without labour. Labour is the engine of production, Capital and machine can do anything but labour is what makes it work. Because labour is the greatest contributor to production, it has to be properly remunerated.

“I don’t need to tell you how bad things are in this country today. if you are on wages, today Nigerians spend 100 per cent of their wages on just feeding. So many don’t even know where their next meal will come from. They pay to train their children only for them to finish school and stay at home without work.

“These are issues we need to discuss. Nobody can be president without sitting down with the labour organisation to decide the future of Nigeria.

“We can no longer have a situation where the leaders are here and workers are there. They must sit at the same table and talk. That is the beginning of the solution, that is what is happening all over the world.

“Nigeria is not a producing country. The collective effect of what we are suffering today is bad leadership. We have a leadership that concentrates on sharing. So you have to move from sharing formula to production formula.

“This is a country of 200 million people sitting on 923,000 square kilometres of land. They can’t feed themselves, they can’t export anything.

“Total Nigeria’s export including oil is under $2 billion for 200 million population. A similar country, not a first world country, one with the same trajectory as Nigeria in the year 2000, Vietnam, sitting on 331,000 square kilometres of land, a third of Nigeria’s land space and 100 million population, with half of Nigeria’s population, their total earnings last year was $ 312 billion.”

He said that more than half of the country’s youths of productive age are unemployed. ” This is what the Labour Party is seeking to sit down to discuss for the future of our country,” he added.