Ex-Anambra State governor, Peter Obi, has asked President Muhammadu Buhari and governors on what basis should the Office of First Lady exist, describing budgetary allocation for the Office as an unnecessary expenditure that should be channeled into something worthwhile.
Anaedoonline.ng reports that Obi stated this on Tuesday as guest speaker at the 8th Annual Foursquare Gospel Church in Lagos, which was organised to raise public consciousness on pressing issues in the polity with a view to finding solutions.
Obi, who frowned at the subsisting insecurity and youths unemployment in the country, asserted that the annual budgetary allocation for the office should be stopped because it increases cost of governance in the country.
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He pointed out that the funds allocated to the Office of the First Lady should be used to fund education and health to halt medical tourism overseas.
According to him, the Office of the First Lady that was not recognized in the Constitution was being serviced with public fund at federal, state and even local government levels.
“The wives of the president, governors and by extension the local government councils did not stand for any election, never campaigned, so on what basis should the office exist in the first place.
“With billions being voted for it, it calls for question from which political trajectory are we hinging our dispensation to allow such to go on without question.
“We are confronted with low revenue and borrowing to fund budgets and debt servicing not to talk of teeming youths without jobs to contend with,” he said.
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Obi added that with the routine staff attached to the offices of First Ladies across the country, the chunk of the nation’s funds goes into servicing unproductive set of people whose existence should have been queried.
He expressed regret that political office holders earned higher than university lecturers unlike in other climes that pirortise investment in education and youths.
The 2019 vice presidential candidate of the PDP attributed the nation’s insecurity to the youths unemployment and underemployment.
In his remark, Rev. Sam Aboyeji, General Overseer of the Church, said that the religious body would continue to focus on areas of the polity that required attention for a better society.
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