TheCable

Ahmed Joda, chairman of the transition committee of President Muhammadu Buhari, says the immediate past administration left a deficit of N7 trillion.

He lamented on the state of the economy, saying the government of former president, Goodluck Jonathan, deceived Nigerians about the real state of the economy.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with Daily Trust, the man, who has played key roles in the transition committees of different governments, also spoke on the challenges of the new government.

“We were told at the beginning of the exercise that the government was in deficit of at least N1.3 trillion and by the end people were talking about N7 trillion,” he said.

“We were to receive the handover notes, study them and wherever necessary to seek clarifications from wherever, whether ministers, civil servants or chairmen of boards or chief executives of parastatals. But, we did not receive those notes in time and our terms of reference although extended by the president limited us by the mere fact of our name ‘transition committee’.

“On  May 29, we could not be a transition committee because the transition had ended. We did not want to ask for extension in order to be able to interrogate the other government people. In any case, the ministers had gone and it would have been a complicated, probably expensive exercise to bring them.

“We did not want to stay and nobody asked us to extend our time to interrogate them so what we said in our report is that look in view of the fact that the handover notes were delayed, we did not have time to interrogate, question or interact with any of the people of government; therefore we leave this to the incoming government. In any case, it would be an investigative thing by now and the government can do what it likes.

“Nigeria should be ready to face a lot of challenges. The biggest in my view is corruption; it is everywhere. There is no department, no ministry that can be said to be free of corruption. There is nowhere that fraud does not take place on a daily basis. It has become embedded in the minds of the people because the rule books have been thrown away and everybody is doing what they like. Nobody follows the rules anymore. You employ people anyhow and pay them anyhow and I think you in the media have a fair idea of what is going on and are surprised how bad things are.

“I often wondered, since the beginning of this exercise, if the PDP and president Jonathan had won the election, what would have been the fate of Nigeria. It would have been more difficult for them to face the challenge because they had been telling people that everything was good; the roads were good. They were not talking about the absence of light in the house, but they were talking about the capacity to produce electricity is 12,000 megawatts out of which only 5,000 could be released.

“But even out of this 5,000, at the time they were doing the handover notes, only 1,300 megawatts was being generated, but they were talking about 35,000 kilometers of distribution lines and so on, but nobody told us the real problem – that there is no gas, or there is no capacity to transmit the electricity that could be generated; that even when it is delivered at the point of distribution, the distribution system is so weak that it can’t take it. I personally didn’t know that until I got into this exercise. Now, if they came back, they couldn’t wake up in the morning and say we can’t pay salaries, we couldn’t do this or even pay contractors and might even not be able to pay pensions and gratuities or finance any of our operations.”