Nigeria is in very safe and competent hands with President Muhammadu Buhari piloting its affairs, Minister of Information and Culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed has said.
He spoke at a mini town hall meeting with the staff of Nigerian Embassy and a cross-section of Nigerians living in Madrid, Spain, at the weekend.
Mohammed said contrary to the fake news being peddled on the social media, Nigeria is making steady progress, especially in revamping the economy, tackling insecurity and fighting corruption โ the three cardinal programmes of the Buhari administration
The minister said: โDonโt believe everything you read on the social media. Nigeria is neither at war nor in crisis. 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.โ
Naysayers, he noted, were spending millions of Naira to distort the true situation of things in Nigeria and to make the administration look bad.
The minister explained that the administrationโs achievements should be evaluated against the background of the tough challenges that it has faced since coming into office on 29 May 2015.
โIt is said that if you donโt know where you are coming from, you wonโt know where you are going,โโ he said.
Mohammed listed challenges as 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 workersโ salaries and many states were unable to pay salaries as some of those challenges.
Mohammed also said 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 being heavily owed, infrastructure was in poor state, power generation was 2,690 megawatts, billions were being paid as โfuel subsidiesโ to fat cats and corruption was the order of the day.
He added that 20 of the 27 local governments in Borno State were under the firm control of Boko Haram.
โToday, the trend is being reversed, and the results are showing: Foreign reserves are now $42.8 billion, the highest level in four years, inflation has fallen for 12 consecutive months to 15.13 per cent, N108 billion has been saved from removal of maintenance fees payable to banks before Treasury Single Account (TSA), the nation is being saved N24.7 billion monthly with the full implementation of the TSA and the elimination of ghost workers has saved the nation N120 billion.
โWith 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, Nigeriaโs 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 Bankโs Ease of Doing Business ranking, and earned a place on the List of Top 10 Reformers in the world,โโ he said.
The minister also told the meeting that the administrationโs agricultural revolution is moving Nigeria close to self-sufficiency in many staples, especially rice, 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.
Mohammed added that power generation has increased to 7,000 megawatts, that Boko Haram has been massively degraded and that the administrationโs is embarking on a massive infrastructural renewal.
The minister, who urged the Nigerians to download the FGN-iAPP to get authentic news from Nigeria, later fielded questions from the Nigerians, with many of them seeking to know when Nigerians in the diaspora will be able to vote, how they can access the national identity card, how they can get authentic information from Nigeria and what the federal government is doing to end the herder-farmer clashes.
Nigeriaโs Ambassador to Spain Mrs. Susan Aderonke Folarin led the embassy staff to the town hall meeting, which was held at the embassy premises.
