From Billy Graham, Abel,  Yola

Ahmed Joda, the chairman of President Muhammadu Buhari’s Transition Committee has said no one should excuse himself from the current recession facing the country. He stated that Nigeria was presently experiencing one of its worst economic crises in decades, with many states unable to pay workers’ salaries.

Speaking to Daily Sun in Yola, the Adamawa state capital recently, Joda, said that no one should blame the  immediate past administration  for the country’s current recession.

“No one can excuse himself of culpability because since independence, everyone had engaged in defrauding Nigeria. For me, the current economic challenges bedevilling the country should not necessarily be blamed on the  immediate past administration. The problem is traceable to what we failed to do as a nation. Because it seems to me everyone in one way  or the other has been conspiring to defraud Nigeria.”

“When he was a military Head of state, he could jail people and order them to queue up, but today, he can’t because he didn’t come through the bullet, he came through the ballot box.

“Now we have the courts and the National Assembly that address constitutional issues and this is the way things have to be done. You cannot jail anybody or even lock them up  for even one hour. You have to follow due process,” Joda, added.

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He also noted that the present administration has been hampered by a lot of red tape and incursions by the courts, saying that “everything has to go through the courts, when you go to the courts and the charges are read as in the cases of Olisah Metuh and Sambo Dasuki, you still have to wait for the courts to decide what happen.

“You can’t spend money until it goes through the National Assembly and the lawmakers  have to debate and approve it. Even when they approve it and you begin to do something that some people don’t like, they go to the court and obtain  an injunction.”

On the issue of recession, he blamed Nigeria’s over dependence on oil as the major  catalyst of the current economic crisis, saying that things had started to go wrong a long time ago.

“I am surprised the recession is not more critical than I expected. It didn’t start in 1999, or in 2011 or 2015. Some things have been going bad for a very long time. Nigeria has always been able to feed itself until the whole system collapsed into a single economy depending on oil. We stopped going to farms; we discouraged mining and we destroyed all the industries.

“I am surprised the recession in the country is not even worse in view of our character to consume without equally producing. We have been pretending to be a big country, but our character as a consumer nation put us at a disadvantage. Even the oil and gas we have, we are not producing them. If we are to tell ourselves the truth, we have four refineries, yet we can’t refine, we have been importing oil.

“We don’t even have enough facilities to import the quantity of fuel that we require. We have managed our affairs badly, and in turn, destroyed our economy. So I’m not surprised that we are in this situation. I’m only surprised that the sitatuation is not even worse.