Lai Mohammed, minister of information and
culture, has asked the Peoples Democratic Party
(PDP) to “hide its head in shame”, saying the
administration of President Muhammadu Buhari
is determined to “pack the mess” it inherited from
successive PDP administrations.
Reacting to PDP’s call on Buhari to resign, the
minister said instead of showing remorse and
rebuilding itself into a strong opposition party, the
party had continued to blame the Buhari
administration for past failures.


”We are on a rescue mission to resuscitate
Nigeria after the PDP left it in a coma, and the
noise from the same PDP seems designed to
sabotage the rescue efforts. But we are not
deterred,” Mohammed said in a statement
”While the PDP was emasculating Nigeria on
all fronts, including social, economic and
political, the rapacious party was deceiving
Nigerians by giving them the illusion of growth
and prosperity.

“Instead of showing remorse and rebuilding
itself to a strong opposition party, the PDP has
continued to blame the Buhari administration,
which is left to pack their mess.
“PDP undertakers have continued to engage in
a blame game, when they should be hiding
from the shame they brought upon themselves
and the nation.
”They keep saying we should stop talking of
the past, yet the past will not stop rearing its
head. They keep saying we should no longer
refer to the past, but how can we forget so
soon that our foreign exchange reserves
plummeted from $62bn in 2008 to $30bn by
2015, at a time when oil prices were at a
historic high, reaching a level of $114 per
barrel in 2014.



“By comparison, Indonesia, another oil
producing economy with a high population,
increased its reserves from $60 billion in 2008
to $120 billion in 2015.
”The candid truth is that we failed under the
successive PDP administrations to save for the
rainy day, and we need to constantly remind
ourselves of that so that we won’t repeat the
mistake. Take the excess crude account which
fell from about $9bn in 2007 to about $2bn in
2015.

“The argument that it was the state governors
that depleted the account does not hold water
since there were governors in place when the
account was being built up.
”Worse still is the fact that up to $14bn in
revenues from Nigerian LNG remains
unaccounted for and indeed until the Buhari
administration came to office, state
governments never got any allocations from
this source of funds which properly belongs to
the federation account.

“The Unclad fact on the revenue front is that
there was just a failure of leadership. This was
compounded by the non-transparent uses of
funds. We are all witnesses to the sacking of a
Central Bank Governor because he raised an
alarm about $20 billion that had gone missing.
”We are indeed still trying to recover huge
sums looted from the national treasury under
the PDP’s watch, with $15 billion stolen from
the defence sector alone. Perhaps most painful
is that because of the way funds (about $322m)
returned from Switzerland were mishandled,
we now have to accept conditionalities before
our stolen assets are even returned to us.”
Mohammed added that while the government will
continue to welcome constructive criticism, it had
nothing to learn from PDP who wasted the
country’s wealth in the time of economic boom.
The minister maintained that the economy was in
a terrible state when the current administration
came on board.
[b]“After earning so much resources and
increasing the total debt stock, our governments
were not able to meet salary obligations,
sometimes for up to seven months, then
something was definitely wrong somewhere and if
this is not evidence of a collapsing economy, one
wonders what it is,” he said.
”Indeed, it was not so long ago that the fuel
subsidy regime almost bankrupted the country.
Through credibility and commitment to good
governance, the current administration has
managed to save up to N1.4 trillion that would
have been spent on subsidies for PMS.
“Moreover, the daily demand for PMS hashas
halved from 1600 trucks a day to 850 trucks a day.
If we could achieve such savings, then clearly the
petrol sector which was and remains a huge
source of foreign exchange demand was not being
well managed.
”It is also important to point out that the poor
security situation in the north-east has had ripple
effects on the economy. Apart from the dislocation
of daily lives, there was extensive loss of
agricultural production arising from the fact that
our citizens in that zone could not go to their
farms not to talk of planting and harvesting
produce.
“Yet, in just a space of about 15 months, the
Buhari administration has liberated this region
from the clutches of Boko Haram, which is now
left to release meaningless videos when it could
no longer carry out spectacular attacks.”