The Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, has stated that “job seekers”, who lost out in the bid to become ministers, are the ones piling pressure on President Muhammadu Buhari, to change his economic team.
Speaking with newsmen in Enugu at the weekend, the Minister stated that calls for a new economic team to steer the country out of recession is propelled by job seekers and echoed by their friends in the media.
He disagreed with comments in some circles that the President should change his economic team as a result of an alleged inability of the federal government to pilot the nation out of the current economic recession.
Ngige argued that this country entered recession a long time ago before the Buhari government came on board but nobody noticed it because of the huge foreign reserves accumulated by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, which has now shrunk to $21billion as a result of the crash in oil prices.
According to him, “Under the previous administration, the oil price was about $115 per barrel and the country exhausted its 2.2 million barrels daily quota of crude oil export.
“But when this government came, the price of oil dropped to as low as $30 per barrel. It later came to $50 per barrel, but because of activities of those blowing up oil pipelines in Niger Delta, we could not export our daily quota of 2.2 million barrels. We are now exporting about 1.2 million barrels,” Ngige said.