The Federal Government has slammed the PDP for once again asking President
\nMuhammadu Buhari to quit, calling the former ruling party a shameless
\nirritant which is bent on distracting the government from its rescue
\nmission and returning the country to \u201cEgypt.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are on a rescue mission to resuscitate Nigeria after the PDP left it
\nin a coma, and the noise from the same PDP seems designed to sabotage the
\nrescue efforts. But we are not deterred,\u201d the Minister of Information and
\nCulture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said in a statement in Abuja on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The Minister said if the PDP had understood the meaning of shame, it would
\nnever have dared to even make a single comment on the same economy that it
\ndid everything to kill.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile the PDP was emasculating Nigeria on all fronts, including social,
\neconomic and political, the rapacious party was deceiving Nigerians by
\ngiving them the illusion of growth and prosperity.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of showing remorse and rebuilding itself to a strong opposition
\nparty, the PDP has continued to blame the successor Buhari Administration
\nwhich is left to pack their mess. PDP undertakers have continued to engage
\nin a blame game, when they should be hiding from the shame they brought
\nupon themselves and the nation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Alhaji Mohammed said what the PDP has consistently put up as a vibrant
\neconomy under its watch was nothing but a bubble that was buoyed by
\nmassive corruption and chronic incompetence, an economy in which someone
\nwithout any known means of earned livelihood would boast of $31.5 million!<\/p>\n
\u201cThey keep saying we should stop talking of the past, yet the past will
\nnot stop rearing its head. They keep saying we should no longer refer to
\nthe past, but how can we forget so soon that our foreign exchange reserves
\nplummeted from $62bn in 2008 to $30bn by 2015, at a time when oil prices
\nwere at a historic high, reaching a level of $114 per barrel in 2014.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy comparison, Indonesia, another oil producing economy with a high
\npopulation, increased its reserves from $60 billion in 2008 to $120
\nbillion in 2015.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe candid truth is that we failed under the successive PDP
\nadministrations to save for the rainy day, and we need to constantly
\nremind ourselves of that so that we won\u2019t repeat the mistake. Take the
\nexcess crude account which fell from about $9bn in 2007 to about $2bn in
\n2015. The argument that it was the State Governors that depleted the
\naccount does not hold water since there were Governors in place when the
\naccount was being built up.<\/p>\n
\u201cWorse still is the fact that up to $14bn in revenues from Nigerian LNG
\nremains unaccounted for and indeed until the Buhari Administration came to
\noffice, State Governments never got any allocations from this source of
\nfunds which properly belongs to the Federation Account.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe naked fact on the revenue front is that there was just a failure of
\nleadership. This was compounded by the non-transparent uses of funds. We
\nare all witnesses to the sacking of a Central Bank Governor because he
\nraised an alarm about $20 billion that had gone missing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are indeed still trying to recover huge sums looted from the national
\ntreasury under the PDP\u2019s watch, with $15 billion stolen from the defence
\nsector alone. Perhaps most painful is that because of the way funds (about
\n$322m) returned from Switzerland were mishandled, we now have to accept
\nconditionalities before our stolen assets are even returned to us,\u201d he
\nsaid.<\/p>\n
Alhaji Mohammed said one of the achievements that the PDP has been touting
\nis that it reduced the nation\u2019s national debt.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, at the time that we were earning such large revenues from oil,
\nwe only managed to double our external debt from $5.6 billion to $10.7
\nbillion between 2011 and 2015. The case of domestic debt was even worse,
\nalmost tripling from N888 billion to N2.1 trillion in the same period.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven these figures mask the extent of unpaid obligations to contractors
\nand the huge plethora of uncompleted projects on which money continued to
\nbe spent without visible results. Payments to contractors stopped several
\nyears ago while not a single dollar was contributed to the Joint Venture
\nactivities. Over N4.5 trillion was spent on fuel subsidy in just two years
\nunder the PDP!<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite a recent oil boom, Nigerians are indeed all victims of the
\ndilapidated and decrepit infrastructure. The economy that the Buhari
\nAdministration inherited was certainly in dire straits, if the huge amount
\nof salary arrears that were being owed at various tiers of government is
\nanything to go by.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf, after earning so much resources and increasing the total debt stock,
\nour governments were not able to meet salary obligations, sometimes for up
\nto seven months, then something was definitely wrong somewhere and if this
\nis not evidence of a collapsing economy, one wonders what it is.<\/p>\n
\u201cIndeed, it was not so long ago that the fuel subsidy regime almost
\nbankrupted the country. Through credibility and commitment to good
\ngovernance, the current administration has managed to save up to N1.4
\ntrillion that would have been spent on subsidies for PMS. Moreover, the
\ndaily demand for PMS has halved from 1600 trucks a day to 850 trucks a
\nday. If we could achieve such savings, then clearly the petrol sector
\nwhich was and remains a huge source of foreign exchange demand was not
\nbeing well managed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is also important to point out that the poor security situation in the
\nNorth East has had ripple effects on the economy. Apart from the
\ndislocation of daily lives, there was extensive loss of agricultural
\nproduction arising from the fact that our citizens in that zone could not
\ngo to their farms not to talk of planting and harvesting produce.<\/p>\n
\u201cYet, in just a space of about 15 months, the Buhari Administration has
\nliberated this region from the clutches of Boko Haram, which is now left
\nto release meaningless videos when it could no longer carry out
\nspectacular attacks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Minister said while the government will continue to welcome
\nconstructive criticism, it had nothing to learn from a party that was in
\ncharge of the nation\u2019s affairs at a time of plenty, but ended up
\nfrittering away the commonwealth, looting the nation blind and setting the
\nstage for today economic crisis, which the Buhari Administration is
\nworking tirelessly to put an end to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Federal Government has slammed the PDP for once again asking President Muhammadu Buhari to quit, calling the former ruling party a shameless irritant which is bent on distracting the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exclusive"],"yoast_head":"\n