The Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi, has
admonished his colleagues in the Muhammadu Buhari
administration to stop blaming former President
Goodluck Jonathan.
Mr. Amaechi said it is time for administration officials to
concentrate on delivering good policies to the citizens
rather than dragging the former president for Nigeria’s
woes.
“I agree with those who said we should stop criticising
the last government and that we should do our own,”
The Nation newspaper quoted Mr. Amaechi as saying
during a meeting at his office Tuesday.
The minister decried Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit,
drawing a comparison with other relatively new countries
like Singapore.
“We need to leverage on what we know. People are
shouting intermodal transport; I went to the new airport
in Singapore and I didn’t find one person at the airport.
“As you walk in, technology takes over,” Mr. Amaechi
said.
He called for an urgent renaissance in Nigeria’s
infrastructure, especially in the area of information and
communications technology.
“They also said in the next few years, they would
introduce driverless cars. We should also think outside
the box about how to improve our transport sector and
think less about how sun and moon affect the sector or
building more bus stops.
“We should see how much investment we can put in the
area of ICT. Intelligence transportation should not be
ignored,” he added.
If heeded, Mr. Amaechi’s call would mark a shift in
Buhari administration’s approach to public engagement.
Since assuming office in 2015, President Buhari has led
his appointees and party members to blame Mr.
Jonathan for failing to properly direct the country’s
affairs during his tenure.
Allegations such as senseless looting of public funds,
nepotism, economic mismanagement and gross abuse
of power are regularly directed at Mr. Jonathan.
In June, Mr. Amaechi slammed Mr. Jonathan
for allegedly failing the Igbo during his years, saying the
former president left the region in a state of disrepair.
“President Jonathan went to Onitsha and danced and
promised to construct Onitsha bridge. Right? After that
nothing happened,” Mr. Amaechi said at a social media
forum in Lagos on June 13.
Bolaji Abdullahi, a spokesperson for the APC, told
PREMIUM TIMES the call was appropriate.
“Enough of blaming the previous administration,
Nigerians want us to focus,” the spokesperson said.
Mr. Abdullahi said the wrongdoings of Mr. Jonathan’s
government would remain in the memories of Nigerians,
but that the current administration was not voted to
amplify them.
“Yes, there were problems created by the previous
administration, but Nigerians didn’t vote for us because
they want us to be telling them who’s responsible. They
want us to be solving problems,” he said.
http://saharareporters.com/2017/12/07/it’s-time-focus-governance-and-stop-blaming-jonathan-—-transportation-minister-amaechi

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naso I heard it too....may God deliver us from the hands of this great propaganda party called APC

the statement was made this morning by senior special assistant to the President on media Adeshina and APC publicity Secretary Bolaji Abdullahi on a programme title Focus Naija on AIT

The presidency has stated that President Muhammadu Buhari never made a promise to Nigerians in 2015 that he would not seek medical treatment abroad if elected. His Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, yesterday disclosed this while appearing as a guest on Focus Nigeria, a programme on Africa Independent Television (AIT). The spokesman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bolaji Abdullahi, who appeared alongside Adesina, also said the much talked about promise the president allegedly made was false. Abdullahi said: “I was the Deputy Director of the policy directorate of the campaign, I was there from the beginning to the end.” “So many people came to join the group, some from even outside the country. Then one day, we were in a meeting, then one gentleman who heads one of the international NGOs in the country brought this list of 100 items that he was proposing that we should push out as the promise of Mr President to Nigerians. “We circulated and asked everyone to study it and come back the following day so that we look at which ones we can own and which ones we need to reject. “I remember that Number 1 on that list was to make the President say that ‘When I become President, I will not travel abroad for medical treatment’. “And I remember we rejected that immediately, because we said we didn’t know what this man was dealing with; we didn’t know who his doctors had been, how could we say this for him? “But you know what happened? One of us in the group just released the document.” Adesina backed Abdullahi’s claim, confirming that the president was never aware of any such promise, let alone agree to it. He said, “I can confirm that even the President himself, who was a candidate then, was not aware. The very week I resumed this assignment, I raised some things with the President. I said, this and this and this were promised, and the President said ‘When did I promise these things?’ “I said there is a document titled ‘100 things Buhari will do in 100 days’. He never knew about that document. He had to ask people to fetch that document for him, and it was the first time he was seeing it. “So there were promises that people made during the campaign on his behalf.” Adesina went further to blame the past administrations of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) for the poor state of healthcare in the country. He said the situation was a major reason for the president’s medical trips abroad. He said, “There was a time we could have afforded it, but the money was not properly spent. That’s why the President keeps lamenting that for a certain number of years consistently, oil prices stood at $100 per barrel, going as high as $120 per barrel at a time, and we were producing about 2.1 million barrels daily. “Then when he (Buhari) came, oil prices plunged to $37 per barrel, so he called the Central Bank Governor and said, ‘Do we have savings?’ and the Governor said ‘No savings.’ “The question is, ‘What did they do with that money? Why didn’t they fix our hospitals in all those years that we had boom?’ “And you know that since 2015, things have been down and they are just looking up now. As things look up, if they ever ever get back to where we were, if we ever get back to $100 per barrel for oil under the Buhari administration, it’s doubtful. “But if we ever get there, you can be sure that a lot will get done, because this is a prudent administration and the money of Nigerians will be used to serve Nigerians.” Recall that the president has made two trips to London this year alone to seek treatment for an undisclosed illness. His most notable trip gulped 103 days, a medical vacation that caused public discontent resulting in many calling for his resignation from office.