“With 2019 In Sight, President Buhari And I Are On Rescue Mission” – Tinubu Says

“With 2019 In Sight, President Buhari And I Are On Rescue Mission” – Tinubu Says

…Osinbajo: We will not stop talking about corruption under PDP

…Opposition party, APC leader bandy words over apology

Tobi Soniyi and Gboyega Akinsanmi in Lagos with agency report

The political romance between President Muhammadu Buhari and the National Leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Chief Bola Ahmed Tinubu, which has been rekindled by the 2019 presidential election, waxed stronger yesterday when both men in separate speeches assured Nigerians that the country was being rescued from the wreckage of past administrations.

Buhari, who is in Lagos for a two-day official visit, spoke at the 10th Bola Tinubu Colloquium held in Nigeria’s commercial capital to mark the APC leader’s 66th birthday.

Buhari at the event, restated his commitment to implementing people-oriented programmes, saying: “Our goal is to bring everybody together for mutually beneficial ethnic, economic, social, religion, political and cultural relationships.

“We are determined to invest in people because we depend on people to govern.”

Buhari, who also commissioned the Ikeja Bus Terminal in Lagos designed to handle 200,000 passengers daily, said his administration would continue to invest in social programmes, including school feeding and agriculture.

He said: “We have set Nigeria on an irreversible path of growth and development. We are resolute to uplift our people and make Nigeria a better place.”

The president described Tinubu as his friend saying, he was happy to be in Lagos “to celebrate the birthday of my friend and political partner”.

According to him, Tinubu is a well-known political strategist who has elevated politics above self.

He said: “I have come to see him as a man who cares about people, who is a fountain of ideas, for the common good of the common man and woman. He has played an appreciative contribution to Nigeria and Africa’s progress.

“We seek a change in the ways and means of our collective existence. We seek to construct a nation where people are no longer ruled by whims, but according to the law and for the betterment of the people.

“We seek to replace corruption with correctness, insecurity with safety, and poverty with prosperity.”

The president called on Nigerians to join him to celebrate “Asiwaju”, a man whom he said was widely known as a political strategist, a caregiver and a man with a vision.

Also speaking at the colloquium attended by several APC governors, party stalwarts, officials from the federal and Lagos State governments and captains of industry, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo said the administration would not stop talking about the corruption perpetrated by the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), wondering why the party does not want people to “talk about the monumental corruption it inflicted on Nigeria”.

According to him, “Upon all I had seen in government in the past three years, the corruption of the five years of the Jonathan government is what destroyed the Nigerian economy.”

He insisted that the money withdrawn from the treasury before the election could have been used to develop infrastructure across the country.

Osinbajo said there was no country in the world that would allow its resources to be plundered in the way Nigeria’s resources were looted and shared and was still expected to be economically viable.

“Every time we talk about corruption, our opponents say don’t talk about it. Just do your own. But we must talk about it. The reason why we must talk about it is because we must let our people know that we can’t afford to go this way again.

“Never again should we allow a system where people take the resources of this country and steal the resources, use the resources against the people and at the same time they want to continue to rule the people.

“We as a party, as your government, must show the difference between us and the government and the party that impoverished our nation. Let me give you an example, in 2014 when oil was between $100 and $114 a barrel, the actual releases for capital expenditure to the three major Ministries of Power, Works and Housing – then they were three separate ministries – in total, was N99 billion. Transportation got N14 billion and agriculture N15 billion.

“Now let us compare that with capital releases to the same ministries in 2017 when oil prices were between $50 and $60 per barrel – N415 billion for power, works and housing, N80 billion for transportation and N65 billion for agriculture, totalling N560 billion at a time when we were earning at least 50 per cent less,” he pointed out.

Osinbajo said it was possible to get this much money to spend on developmental projects because the present government was not stealing public funds.

The vice-president thanked the president for giving him a free hand in the government’s social investment programme, noting that when the APC began its campaign in 2014, the party was determined to change the dominant narrative of Nigeria.

“We were determined to change the narrative on the country which is rich in natural resources and even richer in human capital but was being destroyed daily by the grand corruption and impunity through the looting of public resources.

“We saw a nation where a few had privatised the commonwealth while the majority of the people remained extremely poor. On one of our campaign trips to Zamfara State, Mr. President said look at the eyes of these people; of course, we saw poverty and desperation in their eyes.

“Then he said, ‘They expect us to fix the problem of their poverty as soon as we get into office’.”

This, he said, informed the decision to put N500 billion into the social investment programme. “We have seen today the empirical evidence of that success story,” he added.

Osinbajo also said that when the government enforced the implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), it discovered that there was a lot of money in the system.

He also expressed regret that the PDP government that refused to budget for infrastructure development suddenly released and spent N100 billion in cash during the 2015 election, promising that the Buhari administration would continue to defend the rights of the poor people.

Osinbajo also said that those who benefited from corruption were fighting back, but vowed: “This government will not give up. We will continue to fight corruption.”

He restated that $3 billion was lost to the Strategic Alliance Agreement between a local oil and gas firm, Atlantic Energy Drilling Concept and the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), the upstream subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), noting that the $3 billion was the equivalent of the money spent by this government on road construction across the country.‎

Supporting the position of the vice-president that the administration must continue to expose the magnitude of corruption under the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)-led government, Tinubu said the APC-led administration must continue to talk about corruption.

He said: “They said that we should not talk about it. Seriously, what should we then talk about? After we came into office, we discovered the looting.

“After assuming office, did you expect us to join you in the act and encourage such acts. We are not just talking about the needs of Nigerians.

“Please forget those parties. They will not come back to power. There is no nation that is not facing challenges. Even America is facing its own. So, who are we? How many years of democracy have we practised?

“We did not say that Nigerians would not enjoy. But we have to report back to the millions of Nigerians that elected us into office that this is what we found when we assumed office.”

Tinubu acknowledged that the task of running the country in the last three years has not been easy but enjoined Nigerians not to accept the apology tendered by the PDP for their past mistakes.

“It is not an easy task at all, but dear Nigerians, do not take their apology. They lied, they falsified, they even changed figures. For 16 years, they made fake promises and gave us fake figures.

“And they said we should not talk about it. It is like saying, ‘After all, they did wrong, so do not look at me. Just steal your own.’ But we have a nation to rescue. We have hope to build Nigeria. We have the lead. We have the people to invest in,” he said.

While acknowledging the challenges the APC has had to contend with, Tinubu said: “Life is not without challenges. As a political party, we showed everyone our logo… Our logo with a united Nigeria, we focused on the fight against terrorism, corruption and the promotion of the economic revival of the country.

“I can see what the government is doing with so little resources. But the idea and the fact that they are doing it with beneficiaries and the fact that it is demonstrated in practical terms is what we need to get our country from the tentacles of corrupt officials.”