Prominent businessman and the founder of the Coscharis Group, Cosmas Maduka, has indicated that if Peter Obi had won the presidential election, he would not have enacted policies that differed from those of the current administration.
Speaking in an interview with Okinbaloye on Mic On Podcast on YouTube on Saturday, Maduka stated that Nigeria is moving in the right path despite the obstacles, emphasizing that essential economic policies, such as subsidy reduction, would have been unavoidable under any government.
“People have asked me, will Peter Obi have done anything different if he won the election? I said no. He would have removed the subsidy from day one also,” Maduka stated.
Addressing worries about the naira’s value and economic hardship, Maduka acknowledged the challenge of making such statements as a wealthy individual while maintaining that the government’s focus should be to spend the savings from subsidy removal in infrastructure development.
“The government should be more disciplined to use the money they have removed in the subsidy to put it in infrastructure so that people that you have taken from, those who have been flying private jets from subsidy money, their businesses fall. But if you collect that money from them and put it in ventures that favor the general public, then there is progress,” he explained.
He also warned that if the government fails to direct the money toward productive projects, the country will remain stagnant.
Maduka also spoke on the country’s debt situation, noting that borrowing itself is not the problem, but rather the purpose for which funds are borrowed.
“The borrowing of a country is not a problem. What is the problem? Are you borrowing for capital development? Are you borrowing for infrastructural development? Because it will pay back itself. But if you are borrowing to take a second wife, if you are borrowing to share money for poverty alleviation, you are deepening the hole that, after we get inside, nobody can bring us out,” he said.
He stressed the importance of economic discipline in governance, pushing the government to limit expenditure and put resources toward programs that benefit Nigerians.
“There is some level of discipline that is required to curtail excesses from the government. Are we in the right direction? Yes,” he said.
