President Muhammadu Buhari says his party didn't know what
they were getting into before making so many promises to Nigerians, and as such
made life difficult for themselves with the high expectations from Nigerians
because of the long list of promises made.
The president made this known on Monday when he hosted state
house correspondents at the presidential villa in Abuja.
Buhari described his ministers as hardworking and that his
cabinet members have been doing their best to deliver the change which the All
Progressives Congress (APC) promised Nigerians during the electioneering
campaign.
In his word: “The ministers sit down day and night to work.
Some of them have literarily lost weight because they were sleeping less and
eating less (while working on the budget). They were working on every kobo to
be spent.
“We recently just found out that we are poor because we
don’t have anything to fall back to. This is the condition we found ourselves
and this change mantra had to go through hell up till yesterday.
“And for you to talk to whoever came to visit us throughout
that year, I wonder how each of your diaries would be, because people were
expecting this change mantra in their own way.
“How do you define change? Luckily our party identified
three major items, security, economy and corruption.”
The president spoke on why he reduced the number of
ministries from 42 to 24. He also revealed that some of the permanent
secretaries were disengaged because of lack of commitment.
Buhari added that there is a possibility of the economy
recovering in the last quarter of the year.
“When we came there were 42 ministries we cut it to 24. We
had to do it on our own because we found out that government could not continue
with 42 ministers and the paraphernalia of office so we cut it down to 24,” he
said.
“I underrated the influence of the PDP for 16 years watching
from outside. The experience of the staff, their commitment and zeal is
different from what it is now compared to when I was in government. Sixteen
years of development in the life of a developing nation is a long time.
“Most of the permanent secretaries were sent out because it
was time for some of them to go and for others for one thing or the other.
Because were not part of those 16 years this is where we found ourselves and
this is no joke.
“We had to cut down half the number of permanent secretaries
and then do some cross postings. The permanent secretaries that were there for
the past five, seven, 15 years the only thing that they know is how things were
done in the previous years. Whatever we did in the campaign, in fact we were
saying rubbish and that made it very difficult for us.
“Things were even more difficult during the budget which you
all know about. For somebody like me, for the first time I heard what is called
padding.
“I think we will recover by the fourth quarter of the year,
what padding means especially for ministers who had implement what padding
contains. There were very serious developments which I never knew about.”
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