Vice President Kashim Shettima says the challenges faced by the present administration cannot be attributed to the previous administration led by former President Muhammadu Buhari.
Shettima, at the second Chronicle Roundtable, hosted by the 21st Century Chronicle that, stated that leading Nigeria in the present circumstances is no easy task due to the many obstacles faced.
He also noted that rather than opting for an easy way out, President Bola Tinubu made a difficult decision for the benefit of the country, as first reported by The Nation.
Shettima said: “The president chose the option that will save the lives of the people instead of the ones that will lead to the prolonged economic death. We will not resort to blaming the previous administration as leadership is about courage and continuity.
“Before we took charge, the biggest elephant in the room was about fuel subsidy removal. It was an albatross round the neck of the nation for the past 20 to 30 years. We understood why our predecessor decided to remove the subsidy because there was no sufficient budget for it in the fiscal year.
“A year before we took office, Nigeria’s debt service to revenue ratio had grown to 111.18 percent. It was an economic death sentence.
“To be plain to us, our debt service was that, if you earn N100,000, you are forced to borrow an additional N11,800 to pay the debtor. How do we intend to survive this? It will be long before we become a pariah.”
Shettima added that the subsidy regime’s deliberate corruption resulted in the diversion of resources from vital sectors, stressing, “We have to jettison the subsidy regime; it was a bitter pill to swallow but we had to do it.”
On the economy reforms the Tinubu administration is carrying out, Shettima said: “A presidential candidate in the last election, eager to mock our economic trajectory, once pointed Argentina as a model to Nigeria and became an overnight market specialist. He was convinced that we had missed our way and should have adopted the ways of our friends in South America.
“Barely two weeks, we watched as Argentina’s inflation rate surged. We respect what the president is doing there, but governance is not photocopying.”
He said that the Naira was saved by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the involvement of the National Security Adviser (NSA) to neutralise powerful currency manipulators who had plotted to thwart its reforms.
“Today, I stand proud to say that our intervention has translated into desirable goals,” Shettima said, adding that, currency “speculators were projecting that the Naira would go as far as N5,000 to the dollar. Some bought the dollar at the rate of N2,000 from banks.”
