Osinbajo, Obi dominate as 2019 VP candidates debate

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and Peter Obi, vice-presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), presented the major highlights of the debate for vice presidential candidates of the 2019 elections held on Friday.

A few of the highlights saw Obi and Osinbajo exchange views on corruption and the economy.

Challenging Osinbajo, who is also vice-presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), at the debate organised by the Nigerian Elections Debate Group (NEDG) and the Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria (BON), Obi faulted the government’s economic policy.

“In 2015, unemployment and underemployment was 24%, today it’s 40. In 2015, we were attracting N21 billion in foreign direct investments, we attracted only 12 last year. That means it’s going low. Our GDP was 520 in 2015, and per capital was 2, 500, today it’s under 1, 900. If you look at our stock market, it has lost over N2 trillion in one year,” he said.

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“You are not creating jobs, you are not doing the right thing, and you are just fighting corruption. You can’t shut down your shop and be chasing criminals.”

Responding, Osinbajo said government’s policies would be greatly compromised if corruption is not checked.

“If you allow criminals to steal all the inventories in the shop, there will be no shop,” he said.

“And what has happened in Nigeria in the past 16 years is what the World Bank told us that the major cause of our poverty is corruption. So, let me say that there is no way we can minimise what has happened. You can’t minimise corruption. If you minimise it, we run the risk of completely… in fact the argument is lost. We cannot do what we want to do unless we are able to minimise corruption or eradicate it completely. This is what we are trying do.”

Obi, Osinbajo debated alongside Ganiyu Galadima of ACPN, Khadijah Abdullahi of ANN and Umma Abdullahi-Getso of YPP.

The event held at the congress hall of the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja.

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