Ademola Adebayo

The Minister of Information and Culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed said President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election bid in the forthcoming 2019 general elections would be a walk over as Nigerians are now wiser to discern good from bad administration.

Alhaji Mohammed was speaking today in Ilorin the Kwara state capital, when he visited the NTA station in Ilorin on a familiarization tour.

According to the minister, one of the major challenges the administration is facing is that it has refused to put money in individuals pockets, rather it resolved to make sure that whatever resources that is available to the government was used for the benefit of Nigerians.

“For me, 2019 will be a walkover for APC. I am not saying this because I am the minister of information but because I know Nigerians to be very wise people, Nigerians know that this government is working.

“As a political party, we can campaign on issues. We can say, this is the number of people employed, inflation has fallen for 18 consecutive times.

“Nigerian Stock Exchange has been rated as one of the best 6 performing in the world.

“Under this administration, we have seen the completion of projects. We inherited so many projects because we believe that government is a continuum.

“Some of these projects were started before we came in but were stalled either as a result of lack of funding or incompetence.

“We resolved that no infrastructure will suffer lack of funding, that is why we set up a Presidential Infrastructure Funding N91bn to ensure no project suffers for funding.

“We also took N100bn Sukuk Fund which was shared N16.6bn for each of the six geopolitical zones for 25 critical projects and being funded by the Sukuk fund,” he said.

On the issue of power, he said when the Buhari government came in 2015, the entire generating companies were generating only 5690mw for a population of 190m people.

“In less than two and half years, this administration has generated 7000mw.

“We achieved it by calling all the stakeholders and asking what the challenges were. Even though, it had been privatised before we came in.

“Today, we have generation and distribution privatized, except transmission. Government was not in-charge of power long before we came in. But when we cams in, we could not fold our arms.

“We set aside a $701bn payment Assurance Guarantee, PAG to all the Generating companies, with a caveat that as long as you generate, we will pay you, then we sort out the matter with distribution companies.

“That is why today, we have 7000mw. As a matter of fact, the DISCOS cannot distribute 7000mw, which we are now looking for independent distributors to distribute,’ he said.

 

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