By Danlami Nmodu
Ahead of President Muhammadu Buhari’s presidential rally in Lafia, Nasarawa State capital Wednesday,the State Commissioner for Information, Culture and Tourism, Muhammad J Zakari has defended the achievements of President Buhari.He said contrary to the assertions by opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP which claims, the All Pogressives Congress,APC’s performance has “bested” the record of PDP’s sixteen years in power.
Reacting to PDP’s insistence that APC has failed, Zakari said: “You don’t expect your detractor to say anything good about you,so we don’t expect the PDP to praise the APC..As a matter of fact, your detractor will always look at your faults not your strengths and what you have done to impact people’s lives and so on.And this is politics,if the PDP would speak good of APC, nobody is going to look at PDP.So it is understandable that they would look for excuses and garnish it with lies and say whatever they want.That is just about the PDP.
“I think the APC has done and bested the effort of the PDP in the last 16 years that they (were) in power and these are provable also.One of the issues they like to talk about is security and we have mentioned it repeatedly, that the security situation in this country has improved.And most of the incidences happening in Nigeria, we will not want to justify any incidence as normal.But that incidences and conflicts will always come up..But from the point of view of what we met on ground: take the Boko Haram incidence as one example, you will find that Boko Haram was in control of almost 28 local governments.As we speak today,in spite of the pockets of resurgence of attacks that we have seen here and there, they are not hoisting any of their flags in any territory in this country.If that is not progress,I don’t know what that is.
“The incidence of farmers –herders’ clashes has been there from time immemorial; what we are having are people who take laws into their hands.Both the farmers and the herders happen to be in some cases impatient and therefore taking laws into their hands and create situations that had become difficult for people (to manage).But you could see that in the last couple of months,these incidence has also died down.It means that there have been spirited efforts to ensure that security improved and to ensure that the people move to places of their pleasing without anybody harassing them.
The commissioner added that: “If you look at the economy, it has also been improved in many ways than one.About 20 or above that number of states in 2015 were unable to pay salaries, they had to be given bail outs and so on and so forth. And so the government has done a lot in those areas and I can assure you that even the PDP knows this.Of course they will continue to make the argument that this has not happened.But it is not a mirage.It is something that is seen, that people know and the Nigerian electorate are going to decide which side of the argument they believe.So we are getting there, 16th February is going to decide on that.”
