Nigeria is safe under Buhari, says minister

Olusola Fabiyi, Abuja

The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has said Nigerians are in safe hands with President Muhammadu Buhari at the helm of affairs.

The minister gave the assurance on Saturday at a meeting with the staff of the Nigerian Embassy in Madrid, Spain, and some Nigerians living in the European country.

A statement issued by the Special Assistant to the minister, Mr. Segun Adeyemi, which was made available to our correspondent in Abuja on Sunday,  quoted Mohammed as saying, “Contrary to what you may be reading on the Internet, the Buhari administration is putting Nigeria on a solid footing after the years that were eaten by the locust.’’

He claimed distractors spent millions of naira to distort the true situation in Nigeria and to make the administration look bad.

“It is said that if you don’t know where you are coming from, you won’t know where you are going,’’ he said, listing the fall in the price of crude oil, the low foreign reserves at $24bn, the Federal Government borrowing to pay workers, and states’ inability to pay salaries as some of the challenges.

Mohammed also claimed that when the administration came into office, unpaid pensions had run into billions of Naira in many states, contractors had abandoned sites across the country because they were owed, infrastructure was in poor state, power generation was 2,690 megawatts, billions were being paid as fuel subsidies, corruption was the order of the day, while 20 of the 27 local governments in Borno were under the control of Boko Haram.

He said the administration of President Buhari had reversed the trend. ‘’Today, the trend is being reversed and the results are showing.

Foreign reserves are now $42.8bn, the highest level in four years; inflation has fallen for 12 consecutive months to 15.13 per cent;   N108bn has been saved from the removal of maintenance fees payable to banks before Treasury Single Account; the nation is being saved N24.7bn monthly with the full implementation of the TSA and the elimination of ghost workers has saved the nation N120bn.

“With improved macro-economic conditions, capital inflow is on the upswing, reaching $1.8bn in the second quarter of 2017, which is almost double the $908m in the first quarter; Nigeria’s stock market is one of the best-performing in the world, delivering returns in excess of 40 per cent; Nigeria jumped 24 places on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business ranking, and earned a place on the List of Top 10 Reformers in the world.”

The minister also told the meeting that the administration’s agricultural revolution was moving Nigeria close to self-sufficiency.

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