By Aduragbemi Omiyale
The Minister of Information and Culture, Mr Lai Mohammed, has said Nigerians, especially the beneficiaries of the various social investment programmes, are enjoying a better quality of life under the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
Speaking on Monday at the 16th PMB Administration Scorecard Series (2015-2023) in Abuja, he said the social investment schemes had given a new life to Nigerians.
He described this as a legacy that might be difficult to match, noting that the initiatives remain “unprecedented in the whole of Africa.”
Some of the social investment programmes include N-Power, School Feeding, Conditional Cash Transfer and GEEP (Government Enterprise Empowerment Programme).
“The Buhari administration is leaving a legacy of a social investment programme that is unprecedented in the whole of Africa, a programme that has enhanced the quality of life of the beneficiaries (Nigerians).
“Our pace-setting social investment programmes like N-Power, School Feeding, Conditional Cash Transfer and GEEP (Government Enterprise Empowerment Programme) have benefitted millions of our citizens, both young and old, and this can neither be trivialized nor denied,” the Minister said at the event, which had the Minister of State for Petroleum, Mr Timipre Sylva, addressing newsmen.
Mr Mohammed accused the “opposition [of] trying to distort the achievements of President Muhammadu Buhari for their own selfish ends.”
“While some of the administration’s fiercest critics said we have achieved nothing, others have admitted, though seemingly tongue in cheek, that it’s only in the area of infrastructure that the administration has performed,” he added.
However, he picked holes in this argument, noting that Mr Buhari has succeeded in other areas like security and putting Nigeria on the path of self-sufficiency in many staples, including rice.
“Fertilizer blending plants in the country have increased astronomically from 10 in 2015 to 142 today, and the number of rice mills in the country has increased markedly from 10 in 2015 to 80 today.
“Little wonder that Nigeria, which was the number one export destination for rice in 2014, according to Thai authorities, is now ranked as number 79.
“This is why we cannot understand the campaign promise of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to throw open our borders if elected because this will simply reverse all the gains of the past seven years plus.
“But for Mr President’s insistence that Nigeria should produce what it consumes and consume what it produces, it would have been doubly difficult for our country to survive during the global lockdown because of COVID-19,” he noted.
He submitted that “naysayers” and opposition “masquerading as objective analysts could continue to snipe at us. They can continue to trumpet only the negatives, both real and imagined, but they cannot erase these legacies. They cannot rewrite the history of these past seven years plus.”
