A keynote address delivered by H.E Atiku Abubakar, GCON, Former Vice President, Federal Republic of Nigeria,at the evening of SilverbirdManoftheYearAward at the Eko Hotels and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos.

A keynote address delivered by H.E Atiku Abubakar, GCON, Former Vice President, Federal Republic of Nigeria,at the evening of  SilverbirdManoftheYearAward at the Eko Hotels and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos.

A minute of silence for Nigerians who lost their lives in Adamawa, Benue, Taraba, Zamfara.

Our nation is going through a lot of challenges. There are challenges to our unity, economy. Most worrisome  are the security challenges we are currently facing.

These challenges are actually symptoms. They are not the ailment.

Nigeria is caught in a modern-day Malthusian Trap. For years, our population has been growing faster than our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Our increasing population drives competition for resources that are not keeping pace with population growth.

After contracting for five consecutive quarters, Nigeria came out of recession in the second quarter of 2017 with a GDP growth rate of 0.55%. In the third quarter, we fared better with 1.40%

This month, according to the World Poverty Clock, Nigeria has just overtaken India as the world's capital of extreme poverty. There are more extremely poor people in Nigeria than there are in India, a country that has six times Nigeria's population.

When people do not have jobs and the means to start a business are beyond their reach, they are incrementally much more likely to engage in criminal behaviours like terrorism, kidnapping, militancy and armed robbery.

Nigeria has a median age of 18.3 years. Our population is young. So when we have successful and laudable initiatives like YouWIN, we must continue them even when there has been a change in administration.

We talk of fighting corruption, but let us move beyond sentiments and media trials and look at the facts.

We must try to identify why, though we have been ostensibly fighting corruption for the past few years, Transparency International is scoring Nigeria even lower than in 2014

We have to kill the snake of corruption that swallows the commonwealth that should lift our people up from poverty.

Whether that snake is in a JAMB Office or any other government office, we must kill it or it will kill us.

Nigeria needs to be restructured. We must embrace restructuring as something that must be done to fix Nigeria’s broken systems and not just a campaign gimmick that we fish out of our magic hats and deny after we have gotten what we want.

When I was in government, we reduced recurrent expenditure by introducing the monetization Policy and by privatizing many government enterprises.

Today, those policies have been abandoned and recurrent expenditures have ballooned.

We cannot spend 70% of our budget on recurrent expenditure at a time Nigeria has more unemployed or underemployed people than the entire population of the Republic of Cameroon.

We have to enact laws to prevent leaders from diverting public funds from the public health sector to the treatment of the elite in the best hospitals abroad.

If you can afford it from your own private resources, then pay for it. But do not make the tax payer pay for it.

Our elite are treated in Europe. #BBNaija is being broadcast from South Africa and @Nike is unveiling our FIFA World Cup Jersey in London. Is this the extent to which we have outsourced Nigeria?

We must accept that the difference between Nigerians is not North and South, Christian and Muslim or PDP and APC.

The difference is between good and bad people and we must demonstrate that the good are much more than the bad.

A few days ago, a group of girls were taken from Government Girls Secondary School, Dapchi, in Yobe State. Can we say a silent prayer for a minute for the safe return of the #DapchiGirls?

Thank you ladies and gentlemen and may God bless Nigeria!