The vice-presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Peter Obi, fingered for reeling out fake figures during the 2019 Vice Presidential debate on Friday night have deleted some of his misleading tweets.
Obi had claimed during the live TV debate on Friday in Abuja that Nigeria attracted $41 billion Foreign Direct Investment in its economy in 2015 and that the value of the FDI fell to to $12.5 billion under the Buhari administration, to justify why Buhari must leave looters alone and mind the economy.
Obi, who told other false or unverifiable facts lies during the debate, was fact-checked and his figure for 2015 was found to be wide off the mark.
Apparently embarrassed, he deleted the tweet and replaced it with another.
Here’s the original tweet and the correction he got:
Tolu Ogunlesi who oversees the digital communications for the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, promptly fact checked the claim by Obi.
After Obi had deleted the false information, he attempted to correct the information but only ended muddling himself up.
Today we virtually at a level where our debt is unsustainable. #2019debate
— Peter Obi (@PeterObi) December 14, 2018
Even that figure was false.
ProShare , an investment company dealing with equities said $2.7billion was what came in in 2014 and it fell to $720m in 2015, rising again to $1.4b in 2016, falling again in 2017 to $980million.
Trading Economies.com said Foreign Direct Investment in Nigeria averaged 1279.72 USD Million from 2007 until 2018, reaching an all time high of 3084.90 USD Million in the fourth quarter of 2012 and a record low of 435.64 USD Million in the second quarter of 2018.
IndexMundi, quoting IMF figures also gave FDI for Nigeria as $5,562,874,000 in 2013, $4,655,849,000 in 2014(far lower than the $24billion quoted by Obi), $3,128,592,000 in 2015 and $4,434,648,000 in 2016. It fell to $3.4billion in 2017, according to World Bank data.
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And here is a CBN report on Direct Investments inflow to Nigeria’s economy. The CBN said it increased by 0.7 per cent to US$438.84 million when compared with the preceding quarter of 2018. It however, indicated a decline of 45.0 per cent when compared to the corresponding period of 2017.
“Portfolio Investments inflow to the economy decreased significantly to US$1,790.83 million in Q3 2018 from US$4,233.38 million and US$3,320.84 million in the preceding quarter and the corresponding period of 2017, respectively . However, other investment liabilities increased slightly to US$4,281.48 million when compared with US$3,226.58 million recorded in the preceding quarter”.
Other lies of Obi:
*Peter Obi lied when he said SMEs get only 0.5% of total bank loans of N19trillion to the private sector in Nigeria. According to CBN, the actual figure is N22.44 trillion and only 0.1% goes to the SMEs, as at March 2018.
*Peter Obi said Nigeria’s unemployment is 42%. But NBS statistics said it was 14.2%.
