In an interview granted by the president in Washington DC during his 2-day visit to the US, Buhari made it known that his administration plans to split the NNPC into two in a bid to reform the oil sector. He said rather than breaking the NNPC into four companies, it would be divided into two – regulator and investment vehicle. Read excerpts from the interview made available to The Punch below:
It’s been over a year since the Chibok girls were kidnapped and there has been no real progress made in recovering them, what measures are you taking to bring the girls home?
The kidnap of the Chibok girls is a stain on our national honour and my government will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to rescue them. However, I will not lie to the Nigerian people. After the time that has passed, it is increasingly difficult to know whether we will be able to find all of them as they are likely to have been split up and married off or hidden deep in the forest or countryside.
Nonetheless, my government will not give up. We will do everything in our power to bring back our girls.
You have said that the solution to the Boko Haram insurgency will not just be a military one; does that indicate that you are prepared to negotiate with the group?
Yes, we are prepared to talk to the more moderate elements of Boko Haram. We are prepared to address the legitimate concerns over unemployment, poverty and marginalisation that have driven the insurgency.
We are even prepared to consider some form of amnesty, similar to what is in place in the Niger Delta, for the rank and file who lay down their arms and commit to the peaceful reintegration into society.
However, there can be no forgiveness for the barbaric leadership that has pursued a deliberate policy of diabolical war crimes and terror against the innocent civilian population of Nigeria.
Turning south to the Niger Delta, the amnesty for former combatants which has helped to keep the peace in the Niger Delta is due to end in December this year. What measures do you propose to replace it?
The amnesty still plays an important part in ending the insurgency in the Niger Delta and I am committed to continuing it as long as it is necessary to do so. However, it is not a long-term answer to the problems there.
Just as in the North, the Niger Delta requires long-term investment in both economic and social infrastructure – from roads and railways, to schools, hospitals and housing. That is what people want, a fair share of the resources that their region is producing.
There is some concern that despite spending 14 years trying to become president, you did not exactly hit the ground running and that you will not now be appointing members of the cabinet until September. Why is it taking you so long to get started and put your team in place?
We cannot clean up 16 years of mess in a few months of frantic activity. I know that people are impatient for change, but it is far more important to take your time and take the right steps and appoint the right people than to run around pretending to be doing something, yet achieve nothing.
First, I will make sure that the right rules and management structures are in place to ensure good government.
Only then will I appoint credible ministers, with the track record of delivery and probity in good time. After all, President Obama did not complete the appointment of his first cabinet until five months after he was elected and America did not cease functioning in the meantime.
Nigeria’s economy is heavily over-dependent on the oil and gas sector, accounting for over 80 per cent of GDP and 90 per cent of government revenues. What measures are you putting in place to diversify the economy?
Nigeria is blessed with a rich array of natural resources, not just oil and gas, but abundant solid minerals and huge tracts of arable land.
Forty years ago, Nigeria was a net exporter of food; today we are an importer. We should not only be self-sufficient, we should be the bread basket for Africa.
We have only become over-dependent on oil because of the incompetence and corruption of government that concentrated on how best to steal oil revenues instead of how best to use our oil windfalls to invest in a modern, growing economy.
However, we cannot be content to just export raw materials and commodities abroad: we must become a manufacturing giant. I will not be satisfied until the label “Made in Nigeria” is as common globally, as the label “Made in China.”
My government has a clear plan to diversify and rejuvenate Nigeria’s economy. We are shifting our economic focus to expanding and modernising our agricultural and mining sectors by attracting new private investment – moving away from the overdependence on oil.
We will use our oil revenues to upgrade our decaying infrastructure – boost electricity generation and build new road and rail networks while upgrading our ports.
We will also focus on improving education and skills training so that we can take advantage of the growing global trend for new sources of labour and tackle the crisis of youth unemployment and create a new value-added manufacturing sector.
We are reforming the out-of-date and bureaucratic land laws, giving title deeds to millions of ordinary farmers, so that they will finally be able to use their land to raise capital to invest in modern agricultural equipment and transform production throughout the country.
The global fall in oil prices has hit Nigeria hard, with the Federal Government losing up to half of its revenues in the past year. How is this affecting your reform plans?
Nigeria cannot spend what it doesn’t have. However, given the previous levels of waste and corruption, if we spend what we have more wisely and effectively, we can achieve a great deal more.
One step I have already taken is to pay the salaries of civil servants, some of whom had not been paid for over 10 months.
In the long-term, we must sort out Nigeria’s chaotic finances – we have to diversify government income – both by increasing the size of the non-oil economy and by expanding the tax base, so that the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.
However, we must also sort out spending – we cannot have a situation where half the government’s expenditure goes on the salaries of just two per cent of the population. That said though, we must first pay people the salaries that they have earned.
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