Osinbajo: Politicians have hijacked SURE-P

Yemi Osinbajo, the running mate to the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has alleged that the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), an initiative of the federal government, has been “abused by politicans from different states”.

He said the programme has been hijacked and is now being used as an avenue through which the politicians reward their cronies.

Speaking on Monday during a visit to White House, a popular restaurant at the Yaba axis of Lagos, Osinbajo, who mixed freely with the people he met there and also posed for photographs, expressed confidence that the APC would effectively tackle the country’s challenges.

“The SURE-P budget is a budget that can be abused easily and it has been abused. Politicians from different states now use it as an avenue to give handouts to their friends and cronies.

“The stated objectives of SURE P were to alleviate the sufferings and difficulties that people experience but that has not been achieved and you and I are witnesses to this fact. I don’t know anyone who has benefited from SURE-P. Do you know anyone?”

Osinbajo further revealed that APC had drafted a comprehensive programme capable of improving the lot of the people. He therefore appealed to Nigerians for their support.

“The first thing that we would do when we get into power is to create jobs. Employment is the biggest issue. We would begin with relief and the relief starts with providing jobs in every state. Every state would create 20, 000 jobs on the minimum.

“The second phase is to encourage employers of labour. Any employer of labour who employs over a certain number of people gets a tax bridge, so we can get employers of labour to be interested in employment.

“We are also going to look into roads and railway and that would also provide some jobs. Another area that we would focus on is agriculture. Today, if a farmer produces rice, he is not sure how much he would get from it. But we want to guarantee a minimum price for some of these products so that anyone who produces would rest assured that government would buy off some of these products.

“There is no country in the world that encourages agriculture without subsidising it in one way or the other. Our belief is that you can only encourage people by letting them know that government will buy or pay a minimum for whatever it is that they have produced.

“We are also going to look into low-cost housing, very important. The other thing is to improve the welfare of youth corpers. If you don’t get a job after a year of service, government intends to provide a stipend while you are still looking for a job.

As long as you register for vocational or skill training. That is a way of providing succor. The major problem we have is that 80 per cent of graduates don’t have job and that does not make sense and if that goes on year after year, we are going to have chaos on our hands.”