Billionaire businessman and founder of Coscharis Group, Cosmas Maduka, has stated that Peter Obi would not have implemented policies different from those of the current administration had he won the presidential election.
Speaking in an interview on Mic On Podcast with Okinbaloye via YouTube on Saturday, Maduka asserted that Nigeria is moving in the right direction despite the challenges, emphasising that critical economic policies, such as subsidy removal, would have been inevitable 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 subsidy from day one also,” Maduka stated.
Addressing the concerns surrounding the naira’s value and economic hardship, Maduka acknowledged the difficulty in making such statements as a wealthy individual but maintained that the government’s priority should be reinvesting the savings from subsidy removal into 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 favour the general public, then there is progress,” he explained.
He further cautioned that if the government fails to channel the funds into productive ventures, the country will remain stagnant.
“If you move from one tomb to another, you are still in the same graveyard. You haven’t gone anywhere,” he remarked.
Maduka also touched 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 emphasised the need for fiscal discipline in governance, urging the government to curtail excessive spending and ensure that resources are directed towards projects that will 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.
