The Buhari Media Organisation (BMO) has challenged the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to disprove Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s clarification of the country’s past and present debt profile.
This is in the wake of the Vice President’s explanation that the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari met a debt burden of $63 billion but borrowed $10 billion since assumption of office.
In a statement signed by its Chairman, Niyi Akinsiju and Secretary, Cassidy Madueke, the group said that Professor Osinbajo’s explanation is most appropriate in this season of misinformation and outright lies.
“Nigerians have for several months been fed with half-truths and disinformation by PDP elements on a humongous figure of foreign loans supposedly incurred by the Buhari administration.
“It was so bad that a party which presided over the highest figure of oil receipts in the nation’s history was accusing a more discerning government of mismanagement of funds”, BMO added.
The group wondered how a party under whose watch the country earned $381 billion between 2010 and 2014 could leave a debt burden of $63billion with little on ground in terms of infrastructure.
“Here is an adminstration that also left an outstanding $9 billion debt to International Oil Companies (IOCs) for international cash call as well as several abandoned projects.”
The group added that on the other hand, the All Progressives Congress (APC) government of President Muhammadu Buhari had the lowest oil revenue in the country’s history and is doing a lot more across the six geo political regions.
BMO noted that “Nigeria under Buhari has only earned $112 billion since June 2010 and if you add $10 billion it borrowed, the figure of $122 billion is still a far cry from the 2010-2014 $381 billion oil earnings alone.
“Yet, the administration has not only turned the country into a giant construction site,it has also provided budget support/bail outs to about 22 states which had several months of workers’ salary arrears as well as paid outstanding pensions of ex-Biafran fighters and former staff of the defunct Nigerian Airways.”
“It also introduced the country’s first social welfare programme for the poorest of the poor.”
The group said it is an incontrovertible fact that the Buhari administration has done more with less in three and half years than the sixteen year PDP misrule where the country earned $862 billion from oil alone.
It consequently wants Nigeria to be wary of “pseudo-economists” who have been coining alternative facts in a bid to water down the gains of the last three years.