A legal practitioner, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN), on Monday in Abuja alleged that some principal actors in the All Progressives Congress are mounting pressure on President Muhammadu Buhari with a view to hijack the President’s his economic policies and place them under the control of a few hands.
He said the President had been inundated with numerous suggestions on how to handle the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, especially on the issues bordering on corruption in the agency, noting that such suggestions clearly lacked merit.
Falana also called on the government to reduce the number of the country’s foreign missions, including an African country having a population of about 300,000.
The legal practitioner said this in his keynote address during the public presentation of a book, Economic Diplomacy and Nigeria’s Foreign Policy, written by the immediate past chairman, Board of Tertiary Education Trust Fund and former National Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party, Dr. Musa Babayo.
He said, “National planning have been abandoned for market forces by those who control our country, and what is going on now, even from the APC, there are people that are mounting pressure on President Buhari to continue to run the economy of Nigeria in the interest of a few people and in the personal minority interest of captains of industry.
“But I think the President answered them last week. You know their campaign now is that ‘you must remove fuel subsidy, you must devalue the currency, you must privatise NNPC of all institutions’ and the President said, ‘I am not going to privatise NNPC, I will break it into two for effective performance’, which I think is the best for our country.”
He also wrote-off those accusing Buhari’s administration of lacking clear focus and direction, saying the new government had activated a constitutional provision, which would ensure that all cases of corruption, emanating from the anti-graft agencies, would be dispensed with in the law court within a maximum of six months.
According to him, government has a duty to cut cost of governance by first pruning down the number of embassies in other countries.
“There is an area that we need to develop; now that the government is trying to cut cost. We have too many embassies all over the world. I got to a country in Africa recently and discovered that the country has a population of about 300,000 and we have an embassy there.
“We have embassies in the 16 member states of West Africa and in all African countries. I think we have to do something about that,” he said.
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