The Buhari Media Organisation (BMO) on Tuesday in Abuja challenged the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to disprove Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s clarification of the country’s past and present debt profile.
The organisation gave the challenge in a statement following the Vice President’s explanation that the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration met a debt burden of $63 billion but borrowed $10 billion since assumption of office.
The organisation in a statement signed by its Chairman, Niyi Akinsiju and Secretary Cassidy Madueke, said the Vice President`s explanation was most appropriate, especially in this season of misinformation and outright lies.
It noted that Nigerians had for several months been fed with half truths and disinformation by PDP on a humongous figure of foreign loans supposedly incurred by the administration.
“It was so bad that a party which presided over the highest figure of oil receipts in the nation’s history was accusing a more discerning government of mismanagement of funds,“ BMO added.
It wondered how a party under whose watch the country earned $381 billion between 2010 and 2014 could leave a debt burden of $63billion with little on ground in terms of infrastructure.
The organisation added that the PDP administration also left an outstanding $9 billion debt to International Oil Companies (IOCs) for international cash call as well as several abandoned projects.
It stressed that on the other hand, the Buhari-led APC administration had the lowest oil revenue in the country’s history and was doing a lot more across the country`s six geo political zones.
”Yet, the administration has not only turned the country into a giant construction site. It has also provided budget support and bailouts to about 22 states which had several months of workers’ salary arrears,” the BMO explained.
It added that the Buhari administration had also paid outstanding pensions of ex-Biafran soldiers and former staff of the defunct Nigerian Airways and introduced the country’s first social welfare programme for the poor.
The BMO maintained that it was an incontrovertible fact that the Buhari administration had done more with less in three and half years than the 16 year of PDP where the country earned $862 billion from oil alone.
It, therefore, wants Nigerians to be wary of ”pseudo-economists” who had been coining alternative facts in a bid to water down the gains of the last three years of the APC-led administration.