Posted on: 04:18 Tue, 31 May 2016



President Muhammadu Buhari says he
feels pity for Lai Mohammed, minister
of information and culture, for having
the responsibility of explaining his
actions and his inaction to Nigerians.

Speaking on Monday when he
hosted state house correspondents
at the presidential villa in Abuja,
Buhari said he and his cabinet
members have been doing their
best to deliver the change which
the All Progressives Congress (APC)
promised Nigerians during the
electioneering campaign.

The president described his
ministers as hardworking, saying
they toil day and night to ensure
that his administration succeeds.

“One of the men I pity is Lai
Mohammed. Everyday he is on TV
explaining our performance or lack
of it,” he said.

“The ministers sit down day and
night to work. Some of them have
literarily lost weight because they
were sleeping less and eating less
(while working on the budget).
They were working on every kobo
to be spent.

“We recently just found out that we
are poor because we don’t have
anything to fall back to. This is the
condition we found ourselves and
this change mantra had to go
through hell up till yesterday.

“And for you to talk to whoever
came to visit us throughout that
year, I wonder how each of your
diaries would be, because people
were expecting this change mantra
in their own way.

“How do you define change?
Luckily our party identified three
major items, security, economy and
corruption.”

The president spoke on why he
reduced the number of ministries
from 42 to 24. He also revealed that
some of the permanent secretaries
were disengaged because of lack of
commitment.

Buhari added that there is a
possibility of the economy
recovering in the last quarter of the
year.

“When we came there were 42
ministries we cut it to 24. We had
to do it on our own because we
found out that government could
not continue with 42 ministers and
the paraphernalia of office so we
cut it down to 24,” he said.

“I underrated the influence of the
PDP for 16 years watching from
outside. The experience of the staff,
their commitment and zeal is
different from what it is now
compared to when I was in
government. Sixteen years of
development in the life of a
developing nation is a long time.

“Most of the permanent secretaries
were sent out because it was time
for some of them to go and for
others for one thing or the other.

Because were not part of those 16
years this is where we found
ourselves and this is no joke.
“We had to cut down half the
number of permanent secretaries
and then do some cross postings.

The permanent secretaries that
were there for the past five, seven,
15 years the only thing that they
know is how things were done in
the previous years. Whatever we
did in the campaign, in fact we
were saying rubbish and that made
it very difficult for us.

“Things were even more difficult
during the budget which you all
know about. For somebody like me,
for the first time I heard what is
called padding.

“I think we will recover by the
fourth quarter of the year, what
padding means especially for
ministers who had implement what
padding contains. There were very
serious developments which I never
knew about.”