The Presidency yesterday said former president Goodluck Jonathan’s administration brought Nigeria to her knees and “ruined the economy through mismanagement, corruption and reckless spending, among others”.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, in a statement, was reacting to a recent claim by Jonathan that he left a robust economy for President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration in 2015.
Shehu said Buhari’s administration was handed an economy ravaged by years of mismanagement and corruption.
He said a cursory look at any sector clearly indicated that Jonathan and his government presided over the most ‘monumental and tragic economic mismanagement’ recorded in Nigeria’s history.
He said if Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) were still in power, they would have continued deceiving people by borrowing to fund stealing and wastage and simply postponed the problem for future generations to face.
Shehu noted that at the inception of the current administration, 21 states were unable to meet their salary bills and the spectre of workers arrears had commenced, saying “The PDP solution was to raid the Ecological Fund and selectively grant N2billion each to the PDP states. It was only aggressive borrowing by the Ministry of Finance under Dr Okonjo- Iweala that prevented Federal Government from also owing salaries.”
“In summary, Nigeria earned a lot of money when oil prices were high but there is nothing to show for it. Now oil prices have fallen we are suffering. What could they have done differently?”
Shehu said the Buhari administration had taken a long term strategic view of supporting a stable naira on both the supply and demand sides as well as “Driven import substitution to reduce demand for dollars to buy things we can produce thereby creating thousands of rural jobs in rice and other staples. In addition, there is a credible plan to diversify our revenue sources away from oil, with focus on export crops as well as solid minerals, with the release of US$100M fund to develop solid mineral extraction.”
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