Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), has absolved President Muhammadu Buhari of any blames for the state of the economy.
Sagay instead blamed the poor decisions and massive looting allegedly supervised by his predecessor, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, as the cause of the country’s economic woes.
Speaking at the opening of a two-day National Dialogue on Corruption, organised by PACAC at the State House, Abuja on Thursday, Sagay therefore wondered why a protest called by famous singer, Innocent ‘Tuface’ Idibia did not start from Otuoke, the hometown of Jonathan.
The R&B star had in January called on Nigerians to join him on the the streets on the 6th of February for a nationwide rally to protest against government’s inability to solve the problems of recession and hunger.
While the convener was pressured to call off the rally by security agents, other civil society groups went ahead with the protests in parts of the country.
Sagay suggested that people like Tuface and his backers benefitted from the filth of the Jonathan era and tried to divert attention from the efforts of Buhari to clean up the Augean Table.
He urged Nigerians to direct their frustration on the state of the economy towards Jonathan and not Buhari.
He categorised the people criticizing President Buhari into two, saying sincere Nigerians must appreciate the present administration for trying to fix the problems created by its predecessor.
“One, those who are agents of the looters of 2010 to 2015, and want to divert the attention of the ordinary Nigerians from the true culprits of our recession and misery, by transferring it to a hardworking, selfless administration which met sand rather than cash in our treasuries. The second group are the naïve, unthinking ones who cannot make the slightest connection between cause and effect,” he said.
The professor of law continued: “Is Buhari supposed to conjure wealth from the air? Is he God who can say let there be funds, and there are funds? Why did the demonstrators of 6th February not start from Otuoke? Have they forgotten that the Niger Delta Avengers have destroyed our oil producing capacity so much so that we were producing less than a million barrels a day at a period when the price had plunged from $110 per barrel, as it was in the Jonathan era, to just over $30.
“So, why all this pretence about calling for good governance, (which is infact what we have today) when they looked on with love and adoration, whilst the national wealth was being plundered away and shared by their sponsors and mentors in the previous government.
Why is it that Nigerians hate the truth? If we cannot even be honest enough to admit that the last government’s corruption, wastefulness and misgovernance are the cause of our present hardship, how can we join hands with the present government in salvaging our economy and promoting our social development?”
