The representative of
Bayelsa-East senatorial district, Senator Ben Murray-Bruce, has slammed the
Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, for attributing the current fuel
scarcity in the country to former President Goodluck Jonathan.
Mohammed had in a
statement issued on Monday said, “What we met on the ground is such that we are
paying for the sins of the last administration. One of the reasons for the fuel
scarcity was the inability of the last government to make adequate provision
for fuel subsidy.”
Murray-Bruce said
President Barrack Obama of the United States inherited the most indebted
economy in the world but has succeeded in reducing unemployment and petrol
prices in the country without blaming his predecessor.
The senator, who said
this in a series of tweets on his official Twitter handle on Tuesday,
advised the All Progressives Congress to focus on providing solutions to the
nation’s problems.
He said the reason
Nigerians elected President Muhammadu Buhari was because they wanted to hold
him accountable for running Nigeria and not to continue to blame Jonathan.
The senator said,
“Imagine that government is a relay race, how can this Federal Government
expect to win when it has spent the first part of the race blaming others
instead of working? Instead of blaming Jonathan, swallow your pride and work
towards political collaboration to get us out of this situation.”
In a similar vein, a
media aide to former President Jonathan, Reno Omokri, also issued a statement
condemning Mohammed’s statement on Tuesday.
Omokri, in a statement
entitled, “Jonathan is not to blame,” said Mohammed’s statement was an
abdication of responsibility and did not project the minister and the Federal
Government as being responsible.
He said all the new
power stations that had come on stream this year were either built or completed
by Jonathan.
He said, “A bad workman
may blame his tools but it takes an irresponsible workman to blame his
predecessor! When Jonathan became President on May 6, 2010, he met a comatose
railway network. He did not blame his predecessors. Rather, he went to work.
Within two years, he successfully rehabilitated a significant portion of our
national railway infrastructure and had restored intra and intercity routes for
the first time.
“Since governance is a
continuum, one government takes over from where the other stops and to say that
an action (fuel scarcity) in December of 2015 – months after ex-President
Jonathan handed over to the incumbent on May 29, 2015 – is the fault of the
last President, is to confer superhuman powers on Jonathan.”
Source:Punch
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