- APC governors should put in place policies to save the country
It is heart-warming governors elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have accepted responsibility for the economic recession in the land. As they emerged from a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari, their spokesman, Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State, said the party could not keep passing the buck to the preceding Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that ran the country’s affairs from 1999-2015.
The governors, while still pointing out that the PDP government failed abysmally in laying a sound foundation for the nation’s economy admitted that Nigerians did not elect the APC merely to keep making excuses. It will soon be two years since the APC governments were inaugurated; Nigerians are getting anxious if not exasperated at their inability to turn things around.
Inflation is at an all-time high (17.8%), food prices have skyrocketed beyond the reach of the ordinary Nigerian; the real sector of the economy keeps groaning under scarcity of foreign exchange. The banking sector is not any better as some banks have had to lay off workers. It is worse still that there appears to be no light at the end of the tunnel, as the government keeps coming up with contradictory policies.
The fiscal and monetary authorities appear to be working at cross-purposes. While the finance minister, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, is enunciating policies that she believes would be better complemented by a dip in interest rates, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, has ruled out such a possibility in the nearest future.
The Federal Government has kept announcing its intention to diversify the economy but it has remained much an intention as not much has been done in the solid minerals sector. The admission by APC governors should not end at that; it should be a clarion call on governments at all levels to take concrete steps at formulating policies that would elicit the confidence of Nigerians in the ability of the government they elected to take the economy out of the woods.
We note that the government has failed so far to fulfill expectations raised in the 2016 budget. The social intervention scheme, for example, that would have seen the most vulnerable paid N5,000 monthly and pupils in public primary schools given balanced diet at least once a day remains mere paper schemes. Unemployment too, continues to bite hard. The plan to recruit 500 teachers this year has failed to take off. Thus, our youths are still roaming the streets and the economy is yet to receive the injection that would have seen it gradually pull out of the recession.
Government has a duty to pool all human and material resources together irrespective of party affiliation. This is one beauty of the presidential system of government that we are yet to put into practice. When President Barack Obama assumed office in the United States of America, he retained the Bush administration’s secretary of defence for a while. Even within the APC, very little is being done to hunt for the best talents and this is affecting implementation of government’s plans.
We are yet to feel the input of the ruling party in governance. By now, we expect that the party would have set up committees to evaluate how well governments at the federal and state levels are implementing the party’s manifesto. It appears the government has been left all alone and party leaders are adept at accepting all forms of excuses. Nigerian voters who went through thick and thin to vote out the Jonathan administration last year in the expectation that the APC would bring a refreshing moment, inject new ideas and reduce the cost of governance appear to have been disappointed.
While we commend the APC governors for accepting responsibility for the recession, we look forward to the translation of this to activities that would turn the economy around in the shortest possible time.
