By Emma Ogbuehi
Sponsors and promoters of violent disturbances in the country, will soon be unmasked and brought to justice, President Muhammadu Buhari, has vowed. Buhari who dropped the hint in his June 12 Democracy Day message, blamed the insurgency in the North East and its impacts in other parts of the country as a major hindrance to his agenda of fixing Nigeria.
The President expressed regrets that unscrupulous Nigerians who are benefitting from the ugly situation are further widening the frontiers of the crises, taking undue advantage of the slow process of democracy protocols that are preventing the government from going against them frontally. He assured however that the government is already addressing these obstacles and “will soon bring some of these culprits to justice”.
Buhari stated that while the government is tackling the crisis, it is also addressing the twin underlying drivers of insecurity namely poverty and youth unemployment. He listed efforts of the administration to stabilize the nation including interventions by the government and the Central Bank of Nigeria in driving economic growth over the past 6 years, targeted mostly to the agricultural, services, infrastructure, power and health care sectors of the economy. He stated that in the Agricultural sector, for instance, the Anchor Borrowers Programme resulted in sharp decline in the nation’s major food import bill from $2.23billion in 2014 to US$0.59billion by the end of 2018. Rice import bill, he said, dropped from $1 billion to $18.5 million annually.
“In the manufacturing sector the CBN – BOI N200 billion facility financed the establishment and operations of 60 new industrial hubs across the country, creating an estimated 890,000 direct and indirect jobs”, Buhari remarked.
He added that his vision of pulling 100 million poor Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years has been put into action and can be seen in the National Social Investment Programme, where over 32.6m beneficiaries are taking part. “We now have a National Social register of poor and vulnerable households, identified across 708 local government areas, 8,723 Wards and 86,610 communities in the 36 States and the FCT”, he said.
The President in listing other engagements by the government however admitted that there is still much more to be done in the face of scarce resources and galloping population growth rate that consistently outstrips the administration’s capacity to provide jobs for the populace.