Garba Shehu: President Buhari’s strides in the New Year

7 years ago

Garba Shehu: President Buhari’s strides in the New Year

The administration of President Muhammadu Buhari completed 19 months in office at the end of December. Except for this period being the end of a year and the beginning of another one, it is not a milestone of spectacular importance.

It is, nonetheless, another opportunity to reiterate the Buhari success story, a period in which so much changed. This is even as the beneficiaries of the old order seem even more determined to dislodge that narrative of success.

Here, we are in a country in which an essayist with excellent online credentials writes a syndicated weekly column in which he attacks our minister of Finance, Ms Kemi ADeosun who keeps a clean sheet, not for the work she did for the country but for having graduated from a U.K Polytechnic. But pray, would you rather have as your money keeper an Ivory Leaguer, even though clean by himself/herself that allows a free-for-all looting under his/her watch, or one that is a product of a polytechnic but keeps you money safe?

President Buhari swore to his oath of office on May 29th, 2015 on a promise to tackle insecurity and corruption; to arrest the decline of the economy with a pledge to create jobs and diversify the monocultural economy. These three big, bold ideas warranted the CHANGE in 2015 and the President never loses sight of them.

The most important of the challenges faced by the administration in 2016 were mainly caused by weak revenues.

Oil lost more than 60 percent of its value in the world market and output was severely curtailed by pipeline bombings in the Niger Delta, reducing production by, sometime as much as 50 percent.

Budget for the year 2016 was caught in a serious of disputes between the executive and the Legislative arms of the government following the uncovering of a huge scam through which the allocations to the various ministries were padded with sums that the executive did not ask for.

When the budget was eventually passed and signed, cash backing for capital projects approved for the year came only in the second half of the year. This notwithstanding, the Government pumped an unprecedented N800 billion into the economy for the financing capital projects to lift the country out of recession.

To everyone’s great relief, security in the country improved significantly but that too came with a number of challenges. Vast areas of the country in the Northeast were freed from Boko Haram terrorists and that opened up the humanitarian situation for the world to see: Two million people displaced from their communities faced imminent hunger. On record, we had eradicated the Polio disease, just awaiting certification. With the discovery of new, even though a few cases, Nigeria which was the second of three countries still in the Polio black book suddenly realized that there was more work to do.

The country has been celebrating the “defeat of the Boko Haram” which was officially proclaimed by the office of the Chief of Defense Staff. President Buhari has expressed his pride on the Army’s bravery. But Nigeria won this war on the back of a leadership that is strong and decisive; a President that believes that it is important to end terror for peace, which is a prerequisite for development, to be established.

Given his strong will to win the war, he explored all the ways and means available to the government to ensure that weapons procurement and supplies did not suffer a breakdown. He released the two newest helicopters in the Presidential fleet to the Airforce to strengthen their capacity for air combat and asked the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC to release theirs to the military as well. The Nigerian Airforce must be given credit for the successful conversion of the civilian aircraft to military uses at home here in Nigeria without any foreign technical assistance.

More Details Later.