By Omoniyi Salaudeen
THE presidential candidate of the United Progressive Party (UPP) in the last general election, Chief Chekwas Okorie, in this interview expressed optimism that Nigeria’s economy will come back to full life soon.
How would you assess the one year administration of President Muhammadu Buhari?
My candid and very dispassionate assessment is that Presient Buhari has used his one year in office to consolidate his government and to learn the rope. Though he had been the military head of state, but being a civilian president is a different ballgame.
Secondly, taking power from the opposition party has introduced an unprecedented hiccup because this is the first time it is happening in our country. The discoveries that have been made public so far about the issues of looting is so mind bugling even to those of us from outside that nobody will blame him for taking his time to really set out his programme and to block leakages in the system.
Something that many Nigerians including my humble self do know which has been happening is what we call padding of the budget.
And it was a conspiracy between the executive arm, the bureaucracy and the legislature to present to us a very deceitful document as budget while they went back to share our common patrimony. I cannot remember in the past 16 years when Nigeria could boast of 40 percent implementation of the budget.
The president discovered some of these things and it took him time to know that the budget is worth implementing. These are things any passionate person assessing the government will not ignore.
But a lot of people hold it against him that his inexperience made pudding of the budget possible in the first place. Isn’t it so?
That will be unfair because this has been happening since 1999 which was why we have not experienced 40 percent budget implementation.
So, anybody blaming him now is losing sight of what we have gone through in the past. Again, President Buhari is just about implementing his own budget. He inherited the 2015 budget from the previous government. Now, this is his budget and he has released N360 billion to pay contractors to move them to site.
And these are contracts awarded by his predecessor. He has also appropriated up to N200 billion to pay new certificates that have been generated as a result of work done.
These are in the areas of capital projects. We are not even talking of foreign in flow of investments from China and the rest. So, I will regard his one year as a year of consolidation and learning of ropes. I am very optimistic that this economy will come back to full life.