Mr. Okechukwu Enelamah, Minister of Trade and Investment, says the country will become poorer if Nigerians keep having children.
The Minister said this on Wednesday while reacting to the Brookings Report that rated Nigeria as the country with the most poor people in the world.
“So, I think we should roll up our sleeves as a people and do the work because, if we don’t do it, our people continue to bear children obviously, they would get poorer,” he said.
“He also faulted the data for the global poverty report recently released, insisting it was collected during the period of economic recession.
SaharaReporters had earlier reported that Brookings Institution published a report that put Nigeria ahead of India on the world poverty index.
Mr. Enelamah said: “I think, first, we need to understand when we get these reports that there are reports that are lagging in indicators, which means, people are reporting on history.
“So, when you get reports from Brooking Institution or all sorts of people, you need to look at the context. Somebody may have written a report when we were in a recession. Remember that if you are in a recession, what it means is that even though your population is growing, people don’t stop procreating… which means that in theory depending on how they run those numbers, you will be going the other way. There is absolutely no question that there is an urgency to create employment in Nigeria.
“What I can tell you, with certainty based on one’s background in business and economics, is that if we complete the things on infrastructure and you implement these reports we are doing, that is what I mean by a leading indicator, poverty will go down. There is no magic to it. But you have to do it first, you have put in the infrastructure, you have to implement the economic programme which is what will create the opportunities, they don’t drop from the sky.”
He urged the people to focus more on work so as to assist the government to improve the standard of living in the country.
“I don’t think we should kill ourselves that poverty is something just happen,” he said. “I think it comes out of the urgent need we have as a country which is why we are focusing as a government to make sure that we create the enabling environment, the infrastructure that is required to create opportunities for our people and I believe that will happen in the process of time.”
