PDP Bombs Buhari Over 35 Second Term Achievements

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has berated President Muhammadu Buhari over his “35 second-term achievements”.

Recall that the Presidency had listed 35 policies, programmes and projects as Buhari’s second-term feats.

The presidency in a statement listed the creation of new ministries, the increment of corpers’ monthly allowance to N33,000, N-power intervention scheme, and others as part of the second term achievements of the president.

“President Buhari established new Ministries, including Police Affairs and Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, exactly a year ago, August 21, 2019,” the presidency added.

Reacting in an interview on Friday on Channels TV, Osita Chidoka, an adviser to PDP National Chairman, Uche Secondus, expressed surprise over the list of achievements.

Chidoka said: “I was surprised that the government released a list of 35 achievements this year because a year ago or two years ago, they released 64 achievements. So, even by their quantum of achievements, the government has declined in productivity.

“But when you look at the quality of the achievements, the GDP of this country has fallen from N520bn in 2018 to N350bn… So, everybody is poorer is this government.

“On the economy, Nigeria’s debt has risen to about N36trn. It has grown three times to what it was in 2015. It has grown from about N12trn, meaning that 90 per cent of our revenue is actually going into debt servicing. So, I don’t know how that can be seen as an achievement.

“When you look at the debt profile, it is not as though we borrowed money to invest but we have borrowed money to do practically three things: they’ve used the borrowed money to sustain the naira at an unsustainable rate from N500 that it was during the 2015 fiasco to N360. We’ve also used this borrowing to finance fuel subsidy. The last one is the power sector subsidy. They are complaining that what supposed to have been done in the power sector hasn’t been done. So, the power sector is consuming a huge amount of foreign exchange that the government cannot sustain.

“Therefore, every Nigerian has paid for this strange 35 policies of which the number one on the agenda is the increase in the numbers of ministries. For a country that is currently (using) 90 per cent of its revenue to service its debt, building new ministries and bringing new people into work is certainly not what you should tag as an achievement.”