Governor Muhammed Badaru Abubakar of Jigawa State says the economic challenges facing Nigeria are not the making of President Muhammadu Buhari, explaining that the President is doing all he can to resolve the issues.
In an interview with Saturday Vanguard, Badaru urged Nigerians to be patient with President Muhammadu Buhari's administration, assuring them that things will get better after overcoming the economic challenges in the country.
Below is the excerpt of the interview:
How would you describe the socio-economic policies of the Federal Government so far? Would you say it is going in the right direction?
I believe the Federal Government has done remarkably well considering the situation we found ourselves in after we were sworn-in on May 29, 2015. People tend to forget that the economic downturn actually started manifesting in 2014 due to a growing mismatch between the profligate and reckless spending of the previous government fueled by high oil prices and the resultant shock to the system when prices started to fall. Nigeria’s case was worsened by the fact that with the falling oil prices, our production targets were affected by militant activities in the Niger Delta and outright theft of the nation’s crude on a massive scale perpetrated with the full backing of government officials.
By 2015, the country’s economy was on life support and was literally handed over to the APC government on a stretcher. If you bother to add up all the billions that were stolen in the name of security and the rot in the Oil sector, you will appreciate the fact that these people were not running a government but simply supervising organized sharing of public funds amongst themselves.
It is actually a miracle that the Buhari administration has been able to come this far without a collapse of the economy and the government such as we seeing in Venezuela which had the same toxic combination of a collapsing mono economy and an uncaring administration.
Without the massive operation to plug the leakages in the system and sending a signal that it’s no longer business as usual, Nigeria would not have lasted up to July 2015 with 70% drop in revenue and the unsustainable recurrent expenditure that continues to take the lion’s share.
President Buhari has very few options with the hand that he was dealt with, and the inevitable road to economic diversification that he is leading the country is the silver lining on the Nigerian economic cloud, because even if oil prices rebound subsequently, the commodity will only be one of the several pillars of a decentralized economic model.
It has not been easy and nobody is pretending that it will be, but Nigerians have to understand that we must pass through this very difficult phase before things get better, and macro economics is no respecter of persons or regimes. It took President Obama the whole of his first term to reverse the tide of the economic downturn brought about by the fiscal recklessness of the Bush administration to fund the Iraq war and the global recession, and it was only halfway through his second term that the outlook turned positive.
