A Presidential aspirant under the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Mrs Tari-Oba Oliver, has said that her SET Agenda as contained in her manifesto is capable of transforming Nigeria’s economy and putting it on the path of accelerated and enviable development in Africa.
She stated this while fielding questions from newsmen in order to shed more light on her manifesto in Lagos on Thursday.
Among the socio-economic sectors which her government plans to revamp, she said “we must give priority attention to critical sectors that play central roles in the development of other sectors and sub-sectors.
“On this account, therefore, the ‘SET Agenda’ slogan of my campaign is based on the cardinal understanding that Security, Electricity and Technology (SET) are the major issues in the front-burner over time in Nigeria and we must deal with them decisively in order to set our country on proper footing for impactful national development.”
She lamented that “Nigeria is no doubt worst off than where President Muhammadu Buhari met it in 2015. Armed banditry has overtaken Boko-Haram and other terrorist attacks wrecking unprecedented havoc on the lives and psyche of the masses.
“We will tackle banditry, insurgency, kidnapping and sundry crimes headlong” because in her view, “Insecurity has worsened the economic fortunes of our country resulting in low foreign direct investment and massive exodus of businesses out of Nigeria, increased unemployment, poverty and hardship on the citizens”, she said.
If she is eventually elected, she said, her government would “not only rejig the entire security architecture of the country by recruiting more personnel to augment the well pronounced shortfall of manpower for the military and police, but will also introduce a policy where each recruit is sent back to their states of residence under the watch of the State Government”, she said.
The presidential hopeful also said that the situation in Nigeria’s power sector is appalling and unacceptable and so she would introduce critical reforms for better service delivery in order to power the ailing economy.
She is irked that, “In Africa, for instance, Egypt with a population of 97.55million people generates over 24,000Mega Watts of electricity. South Africa with more than 58miliion people generates over 50,000 Mega Watts while Nigeria with more than 200million people is generating a meager 13,000Mega Watts”.
The aspirant is also determined to, among other steps, decentralize the power generation policy and allow states that have the capacity to generate and distribute their electricity.
Mrs Oliver equally explained that her government would reposition the country on industrial revolution lane via information technology adding that, “The huge potentials of the country harnessing ICT lies in billions of Dollars of of direct wealth that will be created to power the economy”.
She said she would ensure “massive strategic and consistent investments in infrastructural development”, revamp education and health sectors, introduce pragmatic fiscal policies, cut down of costs of governace, establish effective mechanism to check corruption, lift millions of citizens out of poverty through job creation, women and youth empowerment schemes, among others.
