You Can’t trivialise Corruption, Osinbajo tells Obi

The vice-presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Prof Yemi Osinbajo, has said the gravity of corruption should not be trivialised.

Osinbajo, who spoke during the vice-presidential debate at Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, was rebutting a comment by his counterpart in the Peoples Democratic Party, Mr Peter Obi, who criticised the focus of the current administration on anti-corruption.

Obi had said, “You cannot shut down your shops and be chasing criminals.”

But the APC candidate said, “If you allow criminals to steal all the inventory in the shop, there will be no shop. That’s the problem. And what has happened in Nigeria in the past 16 years is what the World Bank told us; that the major cause of our poverty is corruption.

“That is what we’ve been told. So, let me say there is no way we can minimise. You can’t minimise corruption; if you minimise it, we run the risk of completely — in fact, the argument is lost.

“We cannot do what we want to do unless we are able to minimise corruption or eradicate it completely, which is what we’re trying to do.”