Jonathan’s conceding defeat shocked me, says Buhari
One year after the 2015 Presidential elections and assumption in office, President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday declared that he was shocked that former President Goodluck Jonathan conceded defeat to him.
The action, he said, was a great generosity and a great patriotism.
He made the remark during a Presidential Lunch for State House correspondents at the New Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa.
He said: “I underrated the influence of the PDP for 16 years watching
from outside as 8 consecutive governments. The experience of the staff,
their commitment and zeal is different from what it is now. 16 years of
development in the life of a developing nation is a long time.
“This is where I pay my respect to former President Goodluck
Jonathan. This is actually a privileged information for you. He called
me at a quarter past five in the evening. He said good evening your
Excellency Sir, and I said good evening.
“He said I have called to congratulate you that I have conceded
defeat. Of course there was dead silence on my end, because I did not
expect it. I was shocked. I did not expect it because after sixteen
years the man was a deputy governor, governor, Vice President and was
President for six years.
“For him to have conceded defeat even before the result was announced
by INEC, I think it was a great generosity, a great patriotism.
“Abdulsalam recognized the generosity of Jonathan to concede defeat
and said we should go and thank him immediately and that was the first
time I came here,” he added.
According to him, his administration had to trim down the number of
ministries from 42 ministries we cut it to 24 and scaling down of the
number of permanent secretaries in order to save cost of running
government.
He pointed out that most of the permanent secretaries that were there
for over five to seven years only knew how things were done in the
previous years.
He said that the past one year was a tumultuous year for everyone in the Villa.
Talking about his experience in Aso Villa, he said: “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.
“So really it was a nasty experience for us. It was also a nasty
experience for some of the ministers who were new in government, for
them to sit down day and night to work. I saw them some of them
literarily lost weight because they were sleeping less and eating less,
working on every kobo to be spent.
He said that because Nigeria became a mono-economy based on oil, the
past governments relied on oil and forgot about solid minerals,
agriculture, and other resources.
The President added: “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.
“One of the men I pity is Lai Mohammed everyday he is on TV explaining our performance or lack of it.”
He also wondered how some Nigerians betrayed the trust of the people by diverting $2.1 billion meant for fighting insurgency.
He said: “People were trusted and the most recent one which we
haven’t recovered from is the $2.1billion dollars, is was given by the
government then to the military to but hardware to fight the insurgency
which had taken over part of the country and they just sat just the way
you are sitting now and shared the money into their own account.
“They didn’t even bother. So we are still trying to get the
cooperation of the international community and so on and we have to do
it with a lot of respect to the judiciary.
“We can’t go out and talk too much we have to allow the judiciary to
do their work. We gave them the facts, the name, country, bank account.
If you talk too much technicalities will come in, them we will realize
less than what we want to realize.
“So please when next you want to interrogate out visitors try and do
some research so that when they are coming next time, they will do
research themselves,” he stated.
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