Nigerians Are Resilient, We Will Conquer Coronavirus – Yemi Osinbajo

Nigeria’s Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo has come out to say that Nigeria and Nigerians will come out of COVID-19 pandemic stronger.

He revealed this during his interaction at the 2020 edition of ‘The Platform’ themed “Nigeria’s battle against COVID-19”.

According to him, we will all survive the outbreak and be better for it because of our resilience as a nation and the challenges we have overcome in the past.

He added that as for the economy, by ramping up agriculture, especially smallholder agriculture and improving the value chain, especially in storage and processing facilities, more jobs will be created for many young people.

His words, “We will get through this much stronger economically and much stronger as a people because of our resilience. There are a lot of challenges but they offer significant opportunities for us to turn things around.

“I am very confident that Nigerians, with our resilience, our strength and our innovation, we will go through this in great shape.”

“We have to prioritize the use of local resources in all public works. In road construction for instance, it is cheaper to build concrete roads using limestone than spending resources on the importation of bitumen. We have limestone in abundance hence we should be looking in that direction. The road from the Apapa port to the Lagos –Ibadan expressway is being built with cement and is of high quality.

“In the housing sector where we have a huge deficit, we need to focus on using local resources to build houses and in the process we will be creating opportunities for young engineers, architects and builders etc.”

“We think that by ramping up agriculture, especially small holder agriculture and improving the value chain, especially in storage and processing facilities, more jobs will be created for many young people.

“We have found ourselves in a situation where we realize that the way to go is to support the creation of the jobs in agriculture and reduce food imports and ultimately address the issue of unemployment and food shortages.

“What we must do as much as we can is to change the narrative about Nigeria and provide more jobs.”

“if you can ramp up food production and the logistics of bringing food to the urban centres, inflation will be controlled to a large extent.”