Earlier today, the Director General of the Voice of Nigeria, Osita Okechukwu, attacked
former President Goodluck Jonathan, asking him to apologize to Nigerians for fairly woefully as leader of the Nation.
Osita who spoke at an event in Abuja, said going by the financial records, the ex-president and
his party railroaded Nigerians into abject poverty, food insecurity, and deficit infrastructure through lanlessness and squandermania.
Jonathan has released a
statement denying some of the claims made by Osita. Read Jonathan’s statement below
My attention has been drawn to the statement by President Muhammadu Buhari’s former spokesman, Mr Osita
Okechukwu, now the Director General of Voice of Nigeria (VON), who has said that rather than plug the loopholes that allowed
for corruption, former President Goodluck Jonathan opened them up further, contrary to his speech at the non elective convention
of the Peoples Democratic Party, which held this past weekend.
Mr. Okechukwu also said that ex-president Jonathan and his party “railroaded” Nigerians into “abject poverty, food insecurity and deficit infrastructure” via
“planlessness and squandermania”.
I would advise Mr. Okechukwu, to stick to facts.
Mr. Okechukwu should note that the premier global agency universally recognized to gauge corruption is Transparency International who release an
annual Corruption Perception Index.
It may surprise Mr. Okechukwu and his boss to know that the last time Nigeria made progress on Transparency International’s
annual Corruption Perception Index was in 2014 under former President Jonathan when we moved eight places from number
144 to number 136 under Goodluck Jonathan.
That year marked the most improvement Nigeria has ever made since Transparency
International began publishing the annual Corruption Perception Index in 1995.
Transparency International took note of the Jonathan administration’s e-wallet system
that cut out the corruption in Nigeria’s fertilizer procurement system, the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) which weeded
out 50,000 ghost workers from the Federal civil service, the cashless policy and the fact
that the Jonathan government promptly fired two ministers (Professor Barth Nnaji
and Stella Oduah) mentioned in corruption scandals.
