Renowned Nigerian lawyer Femi Falana alleged on Monday, July 27, that some chieftains of the All Progressives Congress were putting pressure on President Muhammadu Buhari in order to hijack his economic policies.
According to The Punch, the legal practitioner noted that Buhari had been receiving numerous suggestions on how to handle the lingering challenges in the country, especially those related to corruption and the NNPC management. Those suggestions, lacking merit, aimed to place economic policies under the control of the “personal minority”, Falana insisted.
He made his position known in speech delivered during Musa Babayo’s book presentation.
Femi Falana
“National planning have been abandoned for market forces by those who control our country, and what is going on now, even from the APC, there are people that are mounting pressure on President Buhari to continue to run the economy of Nigeria in the interest of a few people and in the personal minority interest of captains of industry.
“But I think the President answered them last week. You know their campaign now is that ‘you must remove fuel subsidy, you must devalue the currency, you must privatise NNPC of all institutions’ and the president said, ‘I am not going to privatise NNPC, I will break it into two for effective performance’, which I think is the best for our country.”
In defence of the government’s current line which some characterise as lacking focus, Falana claimed that Buhari’s administration had activated a constitutional provision to ensure legal handling of corruption crimes within a maximum of six months.
He further noted the importance of cutting the cost of governance and suggested the way of reaching the goal:
“There is an area that we need to develop; now that the government is trying to cut cost. We have too many embassies all over the world. I got to a country in Africa recently and discovered that the country has a population of about 300,000 and we have an embassy there. We have embassies in the 16 member states of West Africa and in all African countries. I think we have to do something about that.”
In a separate development President Buhari on Monday once again commented on the issue of his cabinet appointment. The politician said that only decent and experienced people would fill in the ministerial positions.
Earlier this month in an article published in the US Washington Post the country leader claimed that he would appoint senior officials in September.
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