The Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) has described the claim by the federal government that states are responsible for the rise in poverty rate as baseless and false.
The NGF said this in a statement issued by AbdulRazaque Bello-Barkindo, director of media and public affairs.
Earlier, Clem Agba, the minister of state for budget and national planning, had accused state governors of giving more thought to flyovers and airports than improving conditions in rural areas.
Agba said 72 percent of Nigeria’s poor citizens are in the rural areas abandoned by the governors.
Responding to this statement, the NGF explained that the accusation was surprising and unnecessary.
“The tirade early this week by the minister of state for budget and national planning Clement Agba, on the 36 Governors, where he blamed them for the rising poverty index in the country came to the Nigeria Governors’ Forum as a surprise,” the statement reads.
“The minister got his message totally wrong. His attacks are not only unnecessary, but they represent a brazen descent into selective amnesia. It is also diversionary as far as the Governors are concerned.
“The minister who should be responding to a question demanding to know what he and his colleague, the minister of finance, budget and national planning, Zainab Ahmed, were doing to ameliorate the hardship Nigerians attempted to defray the notion that rising levels of hunger and lack were peculiar to Nigeria.
“True as that may be Agba went further to explain that their government, through many of its social security programs, has been dedicating resources to alleviating hardship, and then goes further to accuse state governors of misdirecting resources to projects that have no impact on the people.
“While rightly pointing out that 72% of the poverty in Nigeria is found in the rural areas, the minister said that the rural populace had been abandoned by governors.
“This assertion is not only preposterous and without any empirical basis, but also very far from the truth. It is Clement Agba’s veiled and deliberate effort as a minister, to protect his paymasters and politicize very critical issues of national importance.”
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