The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed on Saturday insisted President Muhammadu Buhari is doing a good job of piloting the affairs of Nigeria.
The minister at a mini town hall meeting with the staff of the Nigerian Embassy in Madrid, Spain, and a cross section of Nigerians living in the European country said that Nigeria is in very safe and competent hands, hence there is no cause for alarm.
”Don’t believe everything you read on the Social Media. Nigeria is neither at war nor in crisis,” Alhaji Mohammed said. ”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 said naysayers are spending millions of Naira to distort the true situation of things 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 drastic fall in the price of crude oil, the low foreign reserves at $24 billion, the fact that the federal government was borrowing to pay workers’ salaries, and the fact that many states were unable to pay salaries as some of those challenges.
”Today, the trend is being reversed, and the results are showing: Foreign reserves is now $42.8b, the highest level in four years, inflation has fallen for 12 consecutive months to 15.13%, 108 billion Naira has been saved from removal of maintenance fees payable to banks before Treasury Single Account (TSA), the nation is being saved 24.7 billion Naira monthly with the full implementation of the TSA and the elimination of ghost workers has saved the nation 120 billion Naira.
”With improved macro-economic conditions, capital inflow is on the upswing, reaching $1.8 billion in the second quarter of 2017, which is almost double the $908 million in the first quarter, Nigeria’s stock market is one of the best-performing in the world, delivering returns in excess of 40 percent, 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,” he said.
The Minister also told the meeting that the Administration’s agricultural revolution is moving Nigeria close to self-sufficiency in many staples, especially rice, that the home-Grown School Feeding Programme has created jobs for 61,352 cooks, and it is providing 6.4 million school children in 33,981 schools across 20 states with one meal a day, that power generation has increased to 7,000 megawatts, that Boko Haram has been massively degraded and that the Administration’s is embarking on a massive infrastructural renewal.
Nigeria’s Ambassador to Spain, Mrs. Susan Aderonke Folarin, led the staff of the embassy to the town hall meeting, which was held at the embassy premises.
