President Muhammadu Buhari has said that many Nigerian youths are uneducated, not ready to work and want everything free from oil revenue.
The President who spoke yesterday, Wednesday during a panel discussion at the Commonwealth Business Forum in Westminster, London, said: “we have a very young population and our population is estimated conservatively to be 180 million. The 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. A lot of them have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil producing country and therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.”
President Buhari, who insisted that he had fulfilled his campaign promises by improving on the nation’s security and the economy, explained that his government has been able to decimate the Boko Haram sect, whose activities, he said, had damaged the education and health infrastructures.
He said that his administration has also made impact in agriculture by giving loans to citizens without asking for collateral.
“Recently, my minister for information was constrained to answer a question by people accusing my administration of doing nothing. He said let Nigerians be reminded the position we were before May 2015 and the condition we are now and what we have achieved between then and now and I think people were impressed with the answer.
“In economy, we are doing very well, especially in agriculture. We are providing soft loans and the guarantee is just that you have to belong to a certain locality and you have land. You don’t need to go to a bank to bring physical collateral. I think a lot is being done.”
Buhari said a sign that security has improved is the plan by Shell to invest $15 billion in Nigeria. [myad]
