‘Nigerians Should Not Be Decieved, Buhari Cannot Rescue Us From Recession’ – PDP

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has
slammed President Muhammadu Buhari over
Nigeria’s economy, saying that the President’s
economic team cannot resuscitate the country’s
ailing economy.
The party said this in a statement by its Director
on New Media, Deji Adeyanju, as it lashed out
at the Buhari-led administration, saying the
government was not taking the right step
towards salvaging the country’s current
economic woes.
The statement reads, “Yesterday, the minister of
finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun stated that the
Muhammadu Buhari administration will focus on
two policies to remove Nigeria from recession,
which are fiscal discipline and diversification.
“Firstly, we believe a recession is not reversed
by diversification. A recession is reversed by
implementing a stimulus package designed to
cut taxes, reduce the cost of doing business and
boost spending on infrastructure & other critical
sectors of the economy.
“Available data shows that the Buhari
administration has spent a meagre 19 percent of
the allocation for CAPEX in budget 2016. This
sort of spending will not make any sort of impact
on the economy.
“Assuming, but not conceding that Mrs Adeosun
is right, the challenge is the past 15 months show
that despite the glib talk the Buhari
administration is doing neither.
“For instance, despite claims of weeding out
ghost workers from the payroll and reducing the
civil service wage bill, Nigeria’s wage bill
increased from N1.65tr in 2014 to N1.83tr and
N1.71tr in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
“These figures represent a combined total
increase of N240bn from the wage bill in 2014.

“Two days ago, the Central Bank of Nigeria
(CBN) released its economic report for Q2 2016
which showed that the FG incurred a N1.09tr
deficit for the quarter. This deficit was 96
percent higher than the N555.49b allowed.
“Total expenditure for this period stood at N1.76
trillion, surpassing the provisional quarterly
budget estimate by 12.8 percent, representing a
58.1 percent increase of the Q1 expenditure.”
“On diversification, GDP figures released by the
Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) yesterday
show that the Buhari administration is doing
significant harm to non-oil sectors of the
economy,” he said.
“Non oil GDP contracted by -0.38 percentin Q2
2016 from -0.18 percent in Q1 2016 and 3.46
percent in Q2 2015.
“Furthermore, CBN figures show that non-oil
export fell by 43.2 percent to $576.97m in Q2
2016.
“As the data shows, even sectors that
experienced growth in Q2 have slowed
considerably compared to Q1 2016 & Q2 2015.
“As these figures show, the Buhari
administration is just paying lip service to the
issue of diversification and it is in fact worsening
the non-oil sectors of the economy.
“These figures also show that Mrs Adeosun’s
comments about fiscal discipline are
diversification are empty rhetoric.
“We reiterate our position that this government
is out of depth and is incapable of reversing the
economic recession into which they have plunged
our nation.”