President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari
He spoke on Thursday when a committee
from the Centre for Human Security of the Olusegun Obasanjo
Presidential Library, presented a five-point policy document to him at
the Buhari Support Organisation office in Abuja.
Hours before the event which held behind
closed doors, the All Progressives Congress, insisted that the
Federal Government was not cooperating with the transition committee set
up by the President-elect.
“Buhari regretted that the outgoing
government that is supposed to give him tips on how to take off has done
nothing so far,” Garba Shehu, the Director of Media and Publicity of
the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Organisation, told
journalists after the presentation by the committee.
Shehu added that the President-elect
“thanked the Obasanjo initiative for the gesture, assuring the committee
that his incoming administration will be needing advice as time goes
on.”
Areas covered by committee in the document include the economy, security, power, education and infrastructure.
He said that Obasanjo had set up a think tank to carry out a study on the challenges facing the country in the five key areas.
The study, he added, was started four
months ago “so that the outcome will be made available to the incoming
administration after the election.”
He also revealed that Nigeria’s former
High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Dr. Christopher Kolade, who
headed the power committee, gave various stages of the proposed power
sector development plan to include short-term, medium-term, long-term
solutions.
Under the short-term solution, the plan
seeks to raise the country’s power generation to 10,000 MW within a very
short period of time.
He added that the president-elect
described the intervention of Obasanjo and his team as a great impetus
for the incoming government.
The vice-chairman of the committee, who
is a former Minister of Finance, Kalu Idika Kalu, said, “We have
looked at education, security, economy, power and Infrastructure. Those
are the areas we have made recommendations and which we hope the new
administration would be able to work on.”
He further explained that the
president-elect was very happy that they had been thinking about how to
help him hit the ground running.
The Chairman of the centre’s
governing board, Akin Mabogunje. who also spoke to journalists after
the event, said the committee had been working on a number of critical
issues for the development of the country.
According to him, a delegation of the
committee members involved in the preparation of the policy document was
sent to present the report to the President-elect.
Earlier on Thursday , the APC described
as untrue, a statement credited to the spokesman for the Peoples
Democratic Party, Oliseh Metuh, that the Jonathan administration was
cooperating with the transition committee constituted by the
President-elect.
It also described Metuh in a statement
signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed, as a man with
“an incurable disdain for truth.”
The PDP spokesman had in the said
statement accused the APC of raising a false alarm over happenings
within the Jonathan and the Buhari transition committees.
However, Mohammed insisted that the uncooperative attitude of the Jonathan team had continued despite its public posturing.
The APC statement Read, “We say with
all sense of responsibility that as of today, May 14, 2015, just about
two weeks to the May 29 handover date, no shred of information as to the
status of governance from any ministry, department or agency of
government has been given to our transition committee.”
“If that qualifies, in Metuh’s lexicon,
as cooperation, then there is a problem somewhere. We dare Metuh or
anyone for that matter, to controvert the fact that not a line of
handover note has been handed over to our transition committee.”
The APC also restated its earlier call
to Metuh to urgently undertake a course on how to be an opposition party
spokesman so that he would not talk or write himself into avoidable
troubles in the days ahead.
It equally admonished him to always verify information available to him in order to separate rumours from facts.
The statement further read, “Metuh
decided to put his foot in his mouth when he latched on to the statement
made by our Transition Committee Chairman, forgetting that in making
his statement, the chairman was only advising him against anything that
would put the Federal Government in a bad light.
“A discerning party spokesman, rather
than a rabble-rousing one, would have understood the elder statesman’s
stand for what it is instead of using it as a peg to issue a needless,
hollow statement that puts his party and government in a bad light.”
The APC said it had decided to allow
bygones be bygones, but now that Metuh had stirred the hornet’s nest, it
was time to put out the facts for Nigerians to judge.
It added, “What happened was that,
following the request by our transition committee to meet with them,
they invited us to what was the first formal meeting between both
transition committees.
“But the meeting was a mere photo-op, as it yielded nothing concrete as far as handover notes are concerned.
“In fact, what we met at the so-called
meeting was far worse than what we had thought. Whereas we had hoped to
get their handover notes on May 14th (the date they had indicated to us
informally), they told us point blank that the notes won’t be ready
until May 24th.
“Because this date falls on a Sunday
that means we won’t be getting the handover notes until May 25th, just
four days before the May 29th handover date.
“How do they honestly expect us to
peruse thousands of pages of handover notes, ask pertinent questions and
seek necessary clarifications within four days? Because we want a
smooth transition, we asked if we could meet with some of the ministers
pending the release of the handover notes, but they said no.
“When one of their members even suggested that the whole process be fast-tracked, they did not budge.
“Despite this setback, we decided not to
put the whole issue in the public domain, until the babbling Metuh
decided to look for trouble, describing the deliberate stonewalling by
the Jonathan Administration as cooperation.”
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