President Muhammadu Buhari says his party didn’t
know what they were getting into before making so
much promises to Nigerians, and as such made life
difficult for themselves with the high expectations
from Nigerians because of the long list of promises
made.
He said his party identified only three major items…
Security, Economy and Corruption.
Speaking on Monday when he hosted state house
correspondents at the presidential villa in Abuja,
Buhari said he and his cabinet members have been
doing their best to deliver the change which the All
Progressives Congress (APC) promised Nigerians
during the electioneering campaign.
The president described his ministers as
hardworking, saying they toil day and night to
ensure that his administration succeeds.
“One of the men I pity is Lai
Mohammed. Everyday he is on TV
explaining our performance or lack of
it,” he said.
“The ministers sit down day and night
to work. Some of them have literarily
lost weight because they were sleeping
less and eating less (while working on
the budget). They were working on
every kobo to be spent.
“We recently just found out that we are
poor because we don’t have anything
to fall back to. This is the condition we
found ourselves and this change
mantra had to go through hell up till
yesterday.
“And for you to talk to whoever came
to visit us throughout that year, I
wonder how each of your diaries would
be, because people were expecting this
change mantra in their own way.
“How do you define change? Luckily
our party identified three major items,
security, economy and corruption.”
The president spoke on why he reduced
the number of ministries from 42 to 24.
He also revealed that some of the
permanent secretaries were disengaged
because of lack of commitment.
Buhari added that there is a possibility of the
economy recovering in the last quarter of the year.
“When we came there were 42
ministries we cut it to 24. We had to
do it on our own because we found out
that government could not continue
with 42 ministers and the
paraphernalia of office so we cut it
down to 24,” he said.
“I underrated the influence of the PDP
for 16 years watching from outside.
The experience of the staff, their
commitment and zeal is different from
what it is now compared to when I
was in government. Sixteen years of
development in the life of a developing
nation is a long time.
“Most of the permanent secretaries
were sent out because it was time for
some of them to go and for others for
one thing or the other. Because were
not part of those 16 years this is where
we found ourselves and this is no joke.
“We had to cut down half the number
of permanent secretaries and then do
some cross postings.
The permanent secretaries that were
there for the past five, seven, 15 years
the only thing that they know is how
things were done in the previous years.
Whatever we did in the campaign, in
fact we were saying rubbish and that
made it very difficult for us.
“Things were even more difficult during
the budget which you all know about.
For somebody like me, for the first time
I heard what is called padding.
“I think we will recover by the fourth
quarter of the year, what padding
means especially for ministers who had
implement what padding contains.
There were very serious developments
which I never knew about.”
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