By Godfrey AKON
The Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media, Mr. Femi Adesina, has described the barrage of criticism hauled at him over the weeklong fuel shortage across the country as coloured and tainted by political considerations.
Speaking at a press briefing in Abuja, organised by Vanguard for Transparent Leadership and Democracy, VATLAD, to proffer solutions to problems confronting the country, Adesina decried what he called unfair assessment of the performance of Buhari in the past seven years.
According to him, “For over the six years that President Buhari has been president and minister of Petroleum, the fuel queues that were a recurrent decimal mostly during festivities in Nigeria vanished.
“Unfortunately, though, most of the criticisms against the president over the fuel shortage have been coloured and tainted by political considerations,” he said.
Adesina further acknowledged the dire security situation in Nigeria, but however noted that Buhari’s administration has risen to the challenge and will continue to do its best to tackle the situation.
While presenting his discourse notes, the Convener of Vanguard for Transparent Leadership and Democracy, Comrade Emmanuel Igbini, said Nigeria’s problems cannot be blamed on one man, stating that the three arms of government share the blame for any failure of governance.
Igbini expressed regrets that the country is battling with the problem of fuel scarcity at a time it is still celebrating the passage of the Petroleum Industry Act, PIA, stating that the country has unfortunately, not been focused on addressing the problems in the petroleum industry, decades after the Abacha regime.
He noted that since the advent of democracy, Nigerians have continued to make a mockery of it by making the judiciary and legislature robber stamps of the executive, adding that the principle of separation of powers has been abandoned.
Speaking on the Electoral Act Amendment Bill currently awaiting presidential assent, Igbini said the National Assembly does not have the power to pressure President Buhari to assent to the bill, adding that his organisation has sent the President a memo not to listen to the agitations being made to pressure him to sign the bill into law.
He argued that the Nigerian constitution does not include the executive in the law-making process.
On his part, a member of the House of Representatives, representing Obi Akpor Federal Constituency, Rivers State, and leader of the PDP Caucus in the House, Hon. Kinsley Chinda, said the reason President Buhari will not sign the Electoral Bill into law is that if he does, APC will lose woefully at the coming elections in 2023.
According to Chinda, Buhari “knows that the House cannot muster 2/3 of members to veto his decision not to sign the electoral bill into law,” adding that the bill has a lot in it that if signed into law, it would help the nation to move forward.
