ABUJA – President Muhammadu Buhari Monday recalled the moment former President Goodluck Jonathan, called to congratulate him prior to formal declaration of the 2015 presidential election result by the Prof Attahiru Jega-led Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.
According to him, when Jonathan called, “I was shocked. I did not expect it,” he told State House correspondents while hosting them to Democracy Day lunch.
President Buhari said it was quite generous of the former President to have conceded defeat and congratulated him while the results were still being counted.
He said, “This is where I pay my respect to former President Goodluck Jonathan. This is actually privileged information for you. He called me at a quarter past five in the evening. He said good evening Your Excellency Sir and I said good evening.
“He said I have called to congratulate you that I have conceded defeat. Of course, there was dead silence on my end, because I did not expect it. I was shocked.
“I did not expect it because after 16 sixteen years the man was a Deputy Governor, Governor, Vice President and was President for six years. For him to have conceded defeat even before the result was announced by INEC I think it was quiet generous and gracious of him.
“Abdulsalam recognized the generosity of Jonathan to concede defeat and said we should go and thank him immediately and that was the first time I came here (Aso Rock).”
President Buhari said he under-estimated the rot in the system occasioned by the misrule of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, for 16 consecutive years.
He spoke further on what he met on ground, “I underrated the influence of the PDP for 16 years watching from outside as eight consecutive governments. The experience of the staff, their commitment and zeal is different from what it is now. Sixteen years of development in the life of a developing nation is a long time.
“When we came there were 42 ministries we cut it to 24. We found out that government could not continue with 42 ministers and the paraphernalia of office so we cut it down to 24. We had to cut down half the number of permanent secretaries and then do some cross postings.
“Things were even more difficult during the budget which you all know about. For somebody like me, for the first time I heard what is called padding.
“I think we will recover by the fourth quarter of the year, what padding means especially for ministers who had to implement what padding contains. There were very serious developments which I never knew about.
“So really it was a nasty experience for us. It was also a nasty experience for some of the ministers who were never in government, for them to sit down day and night to work. I saw them some of them literarily lost weight because they were sleeping less and eating less, working on every kobo to be spent.
“Because we became a mono-economy of oil rich Nigeria, everybody relied on oil and forgot about solid minerals, agriculture, making and exploring things; we recently just found out that we are poor because we don’t have anything to fall back to.
“This is the condition we found ourselves and this change mantra had to go through hell up till yesterday (May 29, 2016).
“One of the men I pitied is Lai Mohammed. Every day, he is on TV explaining our performance or lack of it.
“People were trusted and the most recent one which we haven’t recovered from is the $2.1billion dollars, was given by the government then, to the military to but hardware to fight the insurgency which had taken over part of the country and they just sat just the way you are sitting now and shared the money into their own account.
“They didn’t even bother. So, we are still trying to get the cooperation of the international community and so on and we have to do it with a lot of respect to the judiciary.
“We can’t go out and talk too much we have to allow the judiciary to do their work. We give them the facts, the name, country, bank account. If you talk too much technicalities will come in, then we will realize less than what we want to realize.”
