Mr. Peter Obi, the former governor of Anambra State, has told Vanguard interviewer why Nigeria is a failed country, with the highest number of poor people in the world. He said:
“How we got here is very simple. It’s the collective effects of leadership failure over the years. That is what you are seeing today and it is the continuous leadership failure that is worsening it because, over the years, we, the leaders, have failed to address the problems of the country such as the issue of investing in human development, which is education, investing in social and economic areas and growing the economy, so, the system has deteriorated. Consequently, there is a pool of country full of poor people. That is why, today, we have the highest number of poor people in the world living in Nigeria. I always say it to show how grave this is, our country is 200million in population but we have more people living in poverty than China with a population of 1.4 billion and India that has a population of 1.4 billion too. If you combine China and India population, you get 2.8 billion but we have more people living under poverty in Nigeria than there are in the two countries, combined, just to show you where we are. Over the years, other countries invested in productive things, even have lifted their people out of poverty, but in our own case, we throw people into poverty. That is the cumulative effect of what we are seeing now, coupled with our own government not being serious with the issue of security of lives and poverty. What is happening is not what you can say we did not see coming, we supervised it and are still doing the same thing.”