COVID-19, Economic Recession Affected Buhari’s Performance – Aide

The senior special assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on public affairs, Ajuri Ngelale has rated the performance of his principal in office highly.

The presidential aide said an honest rating of Buhari’s performance over the last seven years must factor in the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the global economic recession.

Despite these factors, Ngelale submitted that the Buhari government has performed creditably well.

Naija News reports he made the submission on Thursday during an interview on Channels Television.

In his view, the performance of the Buhari administration has been limited in some instances due to the earlier-mentioned circumstances that affected resources accruing to the government, while despite the challenges, the current government has done beyond expectation in other areas.

“I can tell you where I think we have not done as we had hoped, and I can tell where we had outperformed in the areas where we had done extremely well,” he said.

Speaking further, he said oil prices went as low as 10 dollars per barrel at a time in the tenure of this administration but despite this, many high-impact projects including those abandoned by previous administrations were executed.

He said: “You cannot talk about what this administration had done without factoring the contexts within which it operated. For example, we are talking about an administration of the last seven years. They dealt with two economic recessions — one of which was global — and a once-in-a-century global pandemic, where we saw oil prices hit as low as 10 dollar per barrel, where countries were shut down.

“We understand that there are these peculiarities that any honest assessment must factor in when we make this assessment.

“With a consistently low oil price from 2016 to 2022, we have been able to construct a high-speed rail line of 326km that had been abandoned since 1987.”

He Has Done Well

Giving an overall assessment of Buhari’s performance, Ngelale said there’s no doubt the President has performed well.

“If you are asking me a straightforward question of whether I believe that President Muhammadu Buhari administration has performed well, given all of the factors that I have mentioned and those that I have not mentioned yet, I will tell you with an emphatic ‘yes’, that he has done well,” he stated.