Mr Olatunbosun Oyintiloye, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has appealed to President Bola Tinubu to urgently address the issue of the high cost of food items in the country.
Oyintiloye, in a chat with newsmen on Sunday in Osogbo, said that Nigerians were hungry and living below the poverty line.
The APC chieftain said that scores of Nigerians were disillusioned wondering where the next meal would come from due to the extreme economic hardship.
Oyintiloye also urged the president not to ignore the United Nations’ prediction that 82 million Nigerians, which is about 64 per cent of the country’s population, may go hungry by 2030.
He said that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data revealed that the food inflation rate in the country hit a record high of 40.66 per cent in May, surpassing the previous month’s of 40.53 increase.
Oyintiloye, a former member of the defunct APC Presidential Campaign Council (PCC), said the common household food items were getting out of the reach of the common man due to the hike in prices.
According to him, despite the abundance of natural and human resources the country is blessed with, successive governments failed to drive the economy productively.
He said corruption and over-dependency on the system of sharing crude oil revenue by the tiers of government was hindering them from running a productive and self-sufficient economy for the benefit of the masses.
Oyintiloye, a former lawmaker, who noted that there was no doubt that the president was doing everything possible to salvage the situation through various intervention programmes, said that the impacts of such interventions were far from ameliorating the situation.
He said prices of basic households, some food items such as rice, beans, garri, spaghetti, and host others were becoming unaffordable by the masses. (NAN)
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