DECEMBER 28, 2015 Dasukigate: Convicts ’ll forfeit property to FG – Buhari

                             

AMID concerns over the dwin­dling fortunes of the economy, President Muhammadu Buhari at the weekend assured that de­spite the fall in oil price, mea­sures taken to block revenue leakages would ensure enough cash to fund the 2016 N6 trillion budget. The President presented the national budget to the joint session of the National Assem­bly last Tuesday in Abuja.

He said anybody convicted in the $2.1billion arms deal would forfeit his/her property to the Federal Government.  According to him, Nigeria is not poor, but noted that the prob­lem had been leadership which did not take seriously the need to curb corruption.

Speaking on BBC Hausa ser­vice on Christmas eve, he said by the time his government blocks all the leakages, there would be enough fund to run the country despite the fall in oil price.

His words: “Remember dur­ing the campaigns, we said Ni­geria is facing three things and nobody disputed that assertion. Firstly; there was widespread insecurity, war in the North- East, while the country’s oil was being stolen at random in the South. Secondly, there is mas­sive unemployment, 62 per cent of the nation’s population are youth from the age of 35 years downward; most of them are un­employed, including those who went to school and those who did not, that is a serious problem.

“Therefore, it has become necessary to restore peace and create employment. That is why we are returning to agriculture and mineral resources. Thirdly, bribery and corruption are basi­cally suffocating the country. If we don’t kill these monsters, this country would go down.

“That is why those who stole monies meant for arms pro­curement and shared the fund among themselves are being arrested and are being shown documents, so that they would be asked to refund the money or face prosecution; we would use those documents to prove what they stole, collect all the assets acquired from the proceeds and then jail them,” he said.

He regretted that his govern­ment inherited N1.5 trillion do­mestic debt, saying that when foreign debt is added, it totals about N2.2 trillion.

“It is generally believed that a fish begins to rot from the head; once the head is rotten, the whole body is also rotten. We have tried to remove all the heads of the organisations, and most of the lieutenants have been changed.

“A lot is happening in this government that people do not appear to understand; many per­manent secretaries of ministries have been changed; we used to have 42 ministers, now we have 36 because the Constitution re­quires that each state of the fed­eration must have a minister; we used to have 42 ministries, now we have 24.

“Everybody knows Nigeria is not a poor country, we are rich, and we have human resources, the problem had been that lead­ership did not take seriously, curbing corrupt tendencies,” he said.

On the N5,000 the All Pro­gressives Congress (APC) -led government promised to pay the poor and vulnerable people, he said it is not possible for every­body to benefit from the gesture.

He explained that the Federal Government will collaborate with the states and local govern­ments in effecting the execution of the programme.

“At the local government level, almost everyone knows each other. It would be easy to identify those to give who would go into trading and how to get it back. It would be like a cooperative and we all know how it operates.

“Also, state governments would identify those who have capacity to employ more people and all we need to do is to em­power them. Our people already know how to go about imple­menting these modalities to create employment for the citi­zens”, he said.

On the December deadline for defeating Boko Haram, President Buhari said his gov­ernment may not achieve full success at the end of the month, but noted that if people would be fair, they would know that the Nigerian Army has basically met the deadline and are win­ning the war.

He said: “I want people to un­derstand that after I settled down and got good grasp of what the country is going through, we removed all the service chiefs and appointed new ones. We also undertook an investigation and found out how the monies meant for arms procurement were diverted and shared by officials in the last administra­tion,” the President noted.

The sun