Works and Housing Minister, Mr Babatunde Fashola has questioned the economic model of production put forward by Mr Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the forthcoming general election.
TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports Peter Obi at different campaign rallies had disclosed he will move Nigeria from a consuming nation to a producing nation if he is elected president of the country on February 25.
However, Mr Fashola, speaking when he was featured in Channels TV’s The 2023 Verdict programme, stressed that to grow an economy, the government must focus on infrastructural development.
“How do you get out of a bad economy? You want to produce, according to one of the candidates. How do you produce without infrastructure?” Fashola queried.
He added: “Where is the production going if you don’t have power, if you don’t have roads to transport it, if you cant move it by sea, if you cant clear it at the port?
“Those economic models are not going to work. This is the backbone of the future of Nigeria and its been done”.
The Works and Housing Minister further stressed that infrastructure is the means to get the Nigerian economy back on track and that nothing can be done without first addressing the issue of infrastructure development.
“Infrastructure is not the end. Buhari never campaigned on infrastructure. He campaigned on the economy.
“I do not see anything you can realistically do in any economy where the infrastructure is ageing, insufficient and broken.
“So, infrastructure is just a means to get the economy back on the roadmap. One party says they will privatize it. We have seen the attempt to privatize the Lagos Ibadan expressway and for 16 years, they did not produce a road.
“We also saw the attempt to privatize the Second Niger Bridge and for about 5 or 6 years, between 2010 and 2015, there was no bridge,” Fashola argued.
