PassingShot:

I wish you displayed this level of frustration when the Ineffectual Buffoon was looting the treasury with his fellow buffoons.

As I've told you before, today's hardship is a result of bad choices and decisions of some years past. Only fools don't know.

Agubushmenyo:


You are quick to point to the deception of another party after 9months in office, but as a goodwill Nigeria, you won't calculate if it is actually worth it!!

Imagine a scenario where unemployed youths are paid 5000naira monthly but the working men and women are owed their dues!! You will still come out to shout "deception"... I am non partisan and I have witnessed "hard times" in the country!!

But yet I judge every government with the "Forces" affecting it and drop in Oil price is one of them!

Let's go back to your State, if you can be frank with me, you will asnwer my question with all sincerity!!!

Name the Government in Nigeria that has fufilled 20 percent of its campaing promises!!

Talk less of after 9months in Office!!

Quote me when you have an answer to give me!!

Remain blessed!!

Edoblakky:
Stop spreading falsehood. 3rd Mainland bridge was started in the 70's. IBB only completed it.

Babacele:
! the Vom- Manchok road has been in existence about 14 years before GEJ administration . so who is fooling who? the VP is correct after all n una propaganda no dey work .

Adminisher:


Reconstructed. We want to see NEW roads.

Let me also tell you. The East west road contract has been awarded about six times by PDP governments, the money chopped and then the contract re awarded. When they really want to scam, they award a road contract, appropriate the money, secure a chinese loan for the same project, then later convert it into PPP.

The things that PDP did with roads in Nigeria are ten times more criminal than Dasuki gate. Osinbajo was not scratching the surface

vedaxcool:
[s][/s]

Boohoo wail me a river

Mylove55:
those completed roads, were they budgeted for in d last 10yrs? For example, obj budgeted and paid for benin-ore road, but d money was stolen by "mr fix it"
D same goes to kano- maiduguri road but was diverted by works minister "lawal"

vedaxcool:
[s][/s]

wailing zombies can't read the vp said new roads you in your ignorance came and engage in this dance of shame of thread based on your biased understanding of what he said .

modath:


Who is arguing with you

Since you have been programmed to speak without inviting your thinking cap along, show me where i have disputed the existence of the other roads?

Unlike you & your ilk that are unable to separate emotions from reality, I don't say what i do not know, You are claiming a completed road, I'm insisting that road has been under construction for over a Decade.

I wont join issues with you, cos you are not worth the effort, kontinuuu with your bull in a china shop mentality, doesn't change the facts on ground..

Hero IB losing that election was not a fluke, people know better, bye felicia!!...

vedaxcool:


Gbam. Wailing zombies cannot define what new means

modath:


Of all these roads, the only one I'm familiar with is the Abuja Lokoja road started by OBASANJO and still not yet completed!! anyone claiming otherwise is telling a big fat LIE..

Anyone intent on calling the VP names can go ahead if that is what will make them sleep easy at night..... The truth however can never be hidden for long.....

sdindan:
APC thank you for turning a man of God into Devil the father of Lai Muhammed.

Baawaa:
Power has CHANGE hands, PDP is now opposition but poor in everything
Poor as ruling party
Poor as opposition

Abagworo:
The VP is right. He said "no new roads". None of the roads listed were conceived and completed in the last 10 years but rather are roads constructed by previous administrations either reconstructed in some parts or maintained in others.

Criteria’s That Determines Integrity
Wikipedia an online encyclopedia defines Integrity as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. It is generally a personal choice to uphold oneself to consistent moral and ethical standards.”
Going by the definition above we can deduce that to be seen a ‘man of integrity’ is not by how successful or not you’ve been, what position you’re presently occupying or have occupied in the past, how many political praise-singers sell you as one, nor how the press perceive you but by how consistent your character disposition has tallied with the principle of been honest, and having strong moral and ethical standards.
Our Vice President and The Moral Burden of Integrity
When I read in the press a statement credited to the Vice President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo on the performance of previous administrations with respect to the Works sector spanning a period of 10 years (2005-2015) and three Presidents (Olusegun Obasanjo, Umar Musa Yar’Adua & Goodluck Ebele Jonathan) I was shocked and wished he was being misquoted but alas he wasn’t. his exact words go thus “Unless we tackle graft, we may not be able to achieve something. The federal government in the past 10 years could not build a single new road, not repairing existing ones alone. Now we have a president who will not steal money and who will not allow anybody to steal money,” going by these highlighted statement credited to our vice president he wants us to believe that the past government over the last 10 years have not built nor repaired a single road.
What do we call new?
Wikipedia gave 3 definitions for the word 'new', one of which is “already existing but seen, experienced, or acquired recently or now for the first time” Going by this definition we can derive some diverse illustrations that best suits this definition.
Illustration 1
If I buy a ‘non-functioning’ Innoson SUV and I replace with new ones all the parts of the SUV except the Innoson label, can I be said to have acquired a brand new Innoson SUV? Of course yes because what I have is no different both in quality and performance from a factory direct purchase version of same SUV.
Illustration 2
If every single laws and provision in the Nigerian constitution is amended to reflect the true aspirations of the Nigerian citizens as against suspending the entire constitution and drafting a new one with same provisions as the amended one to be decided through a referendum. Can the Nigerian constitution be said to be new? Of course yes because both of them will still be one and the same except that the former will remain the 1999 constitution and the later the 2016 constitution.
Illustration 3
If a notorious criminal, you once knew later comes around and narrates to you how he is now a ‘new’ person because he now feels remorse for the life he once lived and is making efforts to correct all his wrong doings hereby turning a new leaf. Can we say he’s personality is not new because his name height, voice et al has not changed or because he still carries the face you knew him with when he was still a criminal?
Now applying the same logic to roads, if the government discovers a bad road and proceeds to re-construct it by removing the top layer of the entire stretch of the road and may even proceed to add more lanes to it thereby expanding the size of the full stretch of the road, can’t that be said to be a new road?
That been said I will now proceed to enumerate some of the many road projects embarked upon by the previous administration of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan alone and with pictorial references.
1. The Benin-Ore road
2. East- west road
3. Abuja-Lokoja Abaji Dualisation
4. Kano-Maiduguri Dualisation
5. Onitsha head-bridge
6. Onitsha Owerri expressway
7. Von-Machok RD
8. Katsina Daura rd
9. The east-west RD
10. IJEBU IGBO-SEKONA (OGUN STATE)
11. GOMBE BYPASS ROAD (GOMBE STATE) et al
To be fair to the vice-president, he might have something else in mind when he made that statement, so I immediately downloaded a copy of the budget as presented by the current administration, I scrolled to the budget of the federal ministry of works to check out its capital projects and check for the so-called ‘new roads’ the VP was talking about, but alas I was vindicated, it was still the same roads that have always existed but were either bad or were at different stages of rehabilitation or re-construction, same thing previous administrations have been doing all along which is rehabilitate or reconstruct bad roads, not draw out a new path and start the construction of a new road because as it stands now all the road paths connecting every state in the country have already been mapped out, just that some of the roads have gone bad.
I and my family are members of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) and are proud of the rich history of leaders that the church have been providing worldwide, Prof Osinbajo is not the first leader to come from RCCG and it will be only fair for him not to use his exalted position to undermine the good name of the Church. As a pastor he should be the custodian of the truth and it is so unbecoming for him to defile the alter of God with his penchant for Pettiness and mudslinging and politicizing the word of God in a bid to attract patronage from gullible followers.
He has no excuse for peddling such falsehood, he cannot say he was ignorant cos definitely he must have used the Benin-ore-shagamu road that leads to his village, and during the campaigns we saw him take pictures on some of this roads he claims never existed and if he was so ignorant he could have at least consulted the Hon.Minister of Works before coming out to spill such damning words that are capable of denigrating the personalities of those who fall in the accused bracket.
In summary, if after 9 months into the much touted government of change the ruling class is still blaming its predecessors and is exhibiting in no small measure its incapacity to proffer solutions to the teeming challenges plaguing the nation but instead keeps adding to this on a daily basis then they should stop grasping at straws and apologize to the electorates for their inherent incapacity as this is the only honourable thing to do
God Bless the Presidency
God Bless Nigeria
God bless Nigerians


Article written by TheShadyExpress
Follow on twitter: @theshadyexpress

In the run up to the 2015 presidential election, leaders and members of APC were very vocal in condemning the then, President Goodluck Jonathan, for every step he took. This included attending churches on Sunday, Jonathan’s religion’s holy day of obligation. It was Babatunde Raji Fashola, the then governor of Lagos State, that succinctly captured the mind of the All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders and supporters then when at the sixth Bola Tinubu Colloquium in Lagos in March 2014, he charged at his listeners by asking if they wanted “someone who spends most of his time in church or mosque, or the man who is ready to spend his time on the job.” That was when life was very sweet as an opposition party especially with the tolerance level of Goodluck Jonathan. At least, Goodluck was spending his time in the country even if, in the hyperbolic words of Fashola, he was spending “most” of it in church.
However, fast forward to today, we have the same Fashola who is currently serving as a minister under Muhammadu Buhari who would remain Nigeria’s most travelled president for a long time in our history. So far, since his inauguration into office on May 29, 2015, President Buhari has traversed 24 countries within a short period of nine months.
Considering our scarce resources, this is too frequent, too costly and is a disturbing development as the nation is in its worst economic quagmire since independence. [b]Never in the history of our nation even when we thought we faced economic recession and hyper-inflation has our exchange rate run on auto-devaluation as it is now. The prices of food stuff and basic items are climbing higher and out of the reach of the common man.The economy is at a standstill! No gainful economic activity going on anywhere. Infrastructural development that characterised Goodluck Jonathan’s administration has since been brought to a halt; our revived agricultural sector is now in a speedy reverse course. While harmless and armless youths protesting peacefully within their constitutional rights are regularly mowed down by mindless security agencies in Zaria, Aba, Onitsha etc, the Supreme Court has come under several severe attacks from the ruling party as the Honourable Justices have resisted the “body language” charm and refused to do the bidding of the party in some of the judgements. Kidnapping has not only returned but assumed a more dangerous and fearful dimension, and the security agents seem overwhelmed.[/b]

Power supply has become more epileptic than ever even as the DISCO’s have hiked their tariff by about 40 percent. There is general disenchantment in the land as the Buhari administration has sufficiently demonstrated a total lack of idea on how to run our economy. This fact is further strengthened by the shambolic and embarrassing preparation of a simple budget.
Nigerians believe that the budget was fraught with fraud and an indication of the hypocrisy of the government’s anti-corruption stance. Having suffered so much, the Buhari budget is widely believed to be the “most stolen”, “most missing”, “most padded”, “most denied”, “most investigated”, “most withdrawn” and “most re-presented” budget, yet, there is no outrage in the land over that garbage. If PDP had made that “mistake” during its time, of course, the country would have been on an uncontrollable conflagration, set on by APC.Despite the rapid descent of the country into catastrophic and unbelievable state of socio-political and economic anomie, President Buhari carries on as if nothing is wrong. The sophistry peddled by the administration’s spin doctors, is that the president’s frequent travels has already yielded much fruits. Obviously, the complaints of Nigerians about the worrying situation of things in the country would no doubt have been sounding like tantrums to the ears of government.
Given Fashola’s lamentations about former president Jonathan’s frequent presence in church, one would have expected this same man and his likes to caution the president about his needless travels.
The argument that he is in talks with some oil producing countries to see how they could help increase the value of oil in the international market by scaling down on output is akin to pouring water in a basket for the purpose of storage.
It is also instructive to note that a majority of our oil patrons have either found new buyers or have embraced alternative sources of energy. Little wonder Buhari seems to be the only president among the oil producing countries who think the best way to shore up the price of oil worldwide is by diplomatic shuttles.
Our nation is dying, the president is travelling and his party is parrying the truth about the situation of things and the true outcome of the president’s frequent travels. Let Buhari return, and spend quality time at home and stop working like a distant learning student!

oduastates:
Ideas floated during a campaign does not necessarily mean policy.
It gives you a window into the campaign's priorities and gauge their engagement.
While some are realistic, others are not . A direct welfare program is destined to fail because we simply lack the mechanism and institutions to make them succeed. Starting from a database of who is unemployed to ghost recipients . Even Countries with advanced institutions have welfare policies that are plagued by fraud.
Also in a country with so many people with a sense of entitlement and very few taxpayers, you can expect civil disobedience if the government ever became incapable of paying the money after starting the program.

By Samson Atekojo Usman on February 25, 2016

It was a stunning revelation at the Senate Committee on Finance’s budget defence, on Thursday, when the management team of Universal Basic Education, explained that the former governor of Ekiti State and Minister of Solid Minerals Dr. Kayode Fayemi had borrowed counterpart funds dedicated for education by the federal government through the Universal Basic Education Commission for other purposes.

The revelation was triggered by question put to the Deputy Executive Secretary of the Commission, Dr. Yakubu Gambo by a member of the Committee, Senator
Adekola Solomon Olamilekan (APC) representing Lagos West Senatorial District.

“It is observed by this Committee that some State Governors divert money meant for executing school infrastructure which was provided by the federal government through UBEC How true is it?” Olamilekan asked.

Gambo confirmed that some governors across the State do tamper with UBE funds by diverting it to other projects not captured within educational framework.

He admitted that such situations had become huge challenge that required amendment of the Act.

He cited Ekiti State as a case study, explaining that during the administration of Dr. Fayemi Kayode, Ekiti State instead of releasing its own counterpart funds so as to draw down the funds, borrowed from its UBEC’s account without the consent of the agency.

He added that the affected Bank having realised that Fayemi may not come back in 2014 Ekiti elections, decided to withheld UBEC’s deposit.

“You see Mr. Chairman, the idea of Ekiti State government going to the Bank to borrow from UBE funds was not with the consent of our agency and the Bank has withheld the money to avoid problems with the new governor and as I speak with you, they have not accessed their funds yet”, Gambo maintained.

Meanwhile the Committee Chairman, Senator John Owan Enoh has advised the Commission to strategise for revenue generation so as to mitigate huge expenditure on education by Federal government, noting that the Senate was ready to assist the Commission in view of its importance in the sector.

“In the spirit of change mantra, the Commission would not only be expending money, but be ready to generate funds”, Owan stated.

ABUJA | BY JULIA PAYNE AND ULF LAESSING

Almost a year after winning an election on promises to fix Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari's grand vision of reform is fading, with power centralized in his increasingly remote presidency and the bureaucracy in disarray.

After axing almost 50 top civil servants and 40 ambassadors and shaking up ministries in a bid to excise endemic graft, the 73-year-old former military ruler has even started cancelling some weekly cabinet meetings.

His aides said this was because under his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, the meeting had become a forum for ministers to hand out over-priced contracts to friends.

Critics say the effect has been to leave government rudderless while Africa's biggest economy flatlines.

Power is concentrated in Buhari's office, where files pile up on the desk of his chief of staff. Ministers appointed only in November - more than six months after Buhari's victory - are reluctant to make decisions, diplomats say.

Government insiders admit things may be getting worse before they get better, but say that is to be expected given the scale of the task in hand.

"Of course it's chaos. We're rebuilding a whole system. There is no depth in the bureaucracy," said a senior government source who asked not to be named.

Buhari is too often absent to provide enough personal guidance, according to his critics.

Since taking office in May, he has been on 26 overseas trips, visiting Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week, where officials say he hopes to drum up interest from investors.

His opponents complain that his external focus comes at the expense of the two pillars of the domestic economy - the oil-producing Niger Delta and Lagos, the sprawling megacity that serves as Nigeria's commercial capital.

He has visited neither as president.

NO BUDGET

Buhari has won plaudits from ordinary Nigerians for fighting graft as part of a crackdown on an elite whose wealth has grown for decades while most of the country's 170 million people remained in poverty.

The army under his command has also reconquered territory from the Boko Haram group in the north, though the jihadists still regularly stage suicide attacks.

But the ascetic general has not yet delivered on a promise to create jobs by ending reliance on oil. His civil service cull has cut avenues for graft but also created knowledge gaps, to the point that the government has so far been unable to produce a viable budget.

Buhari last week fired a senior budget official who had been appointed in August, after he helped to produce a draft which labeled car or computer purchases as capital expenditures, according to Nigerian research group Budgit.

One billion naira - more than $5 million at the official exchange rate - had been budgeted for office furniture alone.

"This was really depressing when we expected that this should be a total shift from the wasteful culture that we had in the past," said Oluseun Onigbinde, founder of the group.

Buhari fired most of the top management at state oil firm NNPC but his replacements have struggled to get a grip on the massive and opaque entity, officials say. Some projects have been delayed as the newcomers struggle to locate the relevant files in the four NNPC towers.

With no regular meetings, ministers are still trying to figure out what they can achieve, officials say. Buhari merged several ministries but since a cabinet retreat in November, he has left them to drift.

Buhari's aides counter that the cabinet meets whenever there is something to decide, and that the government needs time to work out detailed plans - including funding - for such daunting tasks as road-building or the improvement of Nigeria's notoriously erratic power supply.

But a senior civil servant who asked not to be named said ministers struggled to get the attention of Buhari's office.

"There is a proposal, a consultancy does a study but then the report gets ignored," he said.

Buhari asked Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to coordinate economic policy, but diplomats say he is being sidelined as the president personally handles all key issues, including a freeze of the naira exchange rate that is crippling investment.

That leaves businessmen wondering how the West African oil producer can survive its worst economic crisis for decades.

"Policy statements hang but there's no trickle down," said Prince Ike Ubaka, head of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria.