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New Poverty Eradication Program Must Succeed: Nigerian President
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has stressed in the capital Abuja that the new National Poverty Eradication Program (PEP) must succeed this time, warning that anyone who deliberately sabotaged his administration's new PEP would be not forgiven.
Speaking at the end of a two-day retreat organized by the PEP on Sunday, which replaced the failed Poverty Alleviation Program (PAP), Obasanjo accused some governors of sabotaging the PAP for their own selfish reasons.
Expressing his shock of even some governors of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party who also discarded the PAP program initiated by their own party, the president said politics must be practised for the interest of the people, many of whom, he said, are suffering.
It was most unfortunate that these men worked deliberately for the failure of a program like the PAP, he said, stressing that the teeming poor masses who are languishing in poverty are anxious to reap the dividends of democracy.
Obasanjo said the new PEP must succeed this time, stressing that it was for the reason that the new program was kicked off with the special retreat for all the 36 governors and the coordinators of the PEP.
"You will be the people to be directly blamed if this program fails this time around," he added.
Earlier at the opening of the retreat on Saturday, describing the statistics on poverty in Nigeria as alarming, Obasanjo has pledged that the government will fight all out to end the scourge.
"The current situation whereby more than 66 percent of Nigerians are poor is not acceptable, our administration is fully committed to reverse this trend of poverty to ensure that Nigerians have access to basic needs of life," he said.
Following the failure of the Poverty Alleviation Program (PAP) to achieve the desired results, the two-day retreat, which is designed to carry along the stakeholders to be involved in the implementation of the revised version of the PAP, will work out the new PEP that will be implemented successfully throughout the country.
The Nigerian government, which has identified poverty eradication as its core policy since Obasanjo came to power in May 1999, locks the year 2010 as the deadline for the overall target to eradicate absolute poverty in the most populous country on the African continent.
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