Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has reacted to the call for President Buhari's resignation by PDP.The Minister who slammed the opposition party in
statement released today via his Special Adviser, Segun Adeyemi, says it is quite unfortunate that the opposition party does not understand the meaning of shame or it would never have dared to even make a single comment on the
same
economy that it did everything to kill.
According to The statement:
''We are on a rescue mission to resuscitate Nigeria after the PDP left
it in a coma, and the noise from the same PDP seems designed to sabotage
the rescue efforts. But we are not deterred,'' if the PDP had understood the meaning of
shame,.
''While the PDP was emasculating Nigeria on all fronts, including
social, economic and political, the rapacious party was deceiving
Nigerians by giving them the illusion of growth and prosperity.
Instead of showing remorse and rebuilding itself to a strong
opposition party, the PDP has continued to blame the successor Buhari
Administration which is left to pack their mess. PDP undertakers have
continued to engage in a blame game, when they should be hiding from
the shame they brought upon themselves and the nation,'' he said.
Mohammed said what the PDP has consistently put up as a vibrant
economy under its watch was nothing but a bubble that was buoyed by
massive corruption and chronic incompetence, an economy in which
someone without any known means of earned livelihood would boast of
$31.5 million!
''They keep saying we should stop talking of the past, yet the past
will not stop rearing its head.
They keep saying we should no longer
refer to the past, but how can we forget so soon that our foreign
exchange reserves plummeted from $62bn in 2008 to $30bn by 2015, at a
time when oil prices were at a historic high, reaching a level of $114
per barrel in 2014.
By comparison, Indonesia, another oil producing
economy with a high population, increased its reserves from $60
billion in 2008 to $120 billion in 2015. The candid truth is that we
failed under the successive PDP administrations to save for the rainy
day, and we need to constantly remind ourselves of that so that we won't
repeat the mistake.
Take the excess crude account which fell from about $9bn in 2007 to
about $2bn in 2015. The argument that it was the State Governors that
depleted the account
does not hold water since there were Governors in place when the
account was being built up. Worse still is the fact that up to $14bn in
revenues from Nigerian LNG remains unaccounted for and indeed until the
Buhari Administration came to office, State Governments never got any
allocations from this source of funds which properly belongs to the
Federation Account. The
naked fact on the revenue front is that there was just a failure of
leadership.
This was compounded by the non-transparent uses of funds.
We are all witnesses to the sacking of a Central Bank Governor because
he raised an alarm about $20 billion that had gone missing. We are
indeed still trying to recover huge sums looted from the national
treasury under the PDP's watch, with $15 billion stolen from the defence
sector alone.
Perhaps most painful is that because of the way funds (about $322m)
returned from Switzerland were mishandled, we now have to accept
conditionalities before our stolen assets are even returned to us,'' he
said.
Mohammed said one of the achievements that the PDP has been
touting is that it reduced the nation's national debt.
''However, at the time that we were earning such large revenues from
oil, we only managed to double our external debt from $5.6 billion to
$10.7 billion between 2011 and 2015.
The case of domestic debt was
even worse, almost tripling from N888 billion to N2.1 trillion in the
same period. Even these figures mask the extent of unpaid obligations
to contractors and the huge plethora of uncompleted projects on which
money continued to be spent without visible results. Payments to
contractors stopped several years ago while not a single dollar was
contributed to the Joint Venture activities.
Over N4.5 trillion was
spent on fuel subsidy in just two years under the PDP! Despite a recent
oil boom, Nigerians are indeed all victims of the dilapidated and
decrepit infrastructure. The economy that the Buhari Administration
inherited was certainly in dire straits, if the huge amount of salary
arrears that were being owed at various tiers of government is anything
to go by. If, after earning so much resources and increasing the total
debt stock, our governments were not able to
meet salary obligations, sometimes for up to seven months, then
something was definitely wrong somewhere and if this is not evidence
of a collapsing economy, one wonders what it is.
Indeed, it was not so long ago that the fuel subsidy regime almost
bankrupted the country. Through credibility and commitment to good
governance, the current administration has managed to save up to N1.4
trillion that would have been spent on subsidies for PMS. Moreover, the
daily demand for PMS has halved from 1600 trucks a day to 850
trucks a day.
If we could achieve such savings, then clearly the
petrol sector which was and remains a huge source of foreign exchange
demand was not being well managed. It is also important to point out
that the poor security situation in the North East has had ripple
effects on the economy.
Apart from the dislocation of daily lives, there was extensive loss of
agricultural production arising from the fact that our citizens in
that zone could not go to their farms not to talk of planting and
harvesting produce. Yet, in just a space of about 15 months, the
Buhari Administration has liberated this region from the clutches of
Boko Haram, which is now left to release meaningless videos when it
could no longer carry out spectacular attacks,'' he said.
He however, added that the government will continue to welcome
constructive criticism, it had nothing to learn from a party that was
in charge of the nation's affairs at a time of plenty, but ended up
frittering away the commonwealth, looting the nation blind and setting
the stage for today economic crisis, which the Buhari Administration is
working tirelessly to put an end to.
Garba Shehu
