Ajuri Ngelale, senior special assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on public affairs, has insisted that his principal’s administration has performed well in many areas.
Appearing on a Channels Television program last night, Ajuri said an “honest assessment” of Buhari’s administration must consider the impact of COVID pandemic, economic recessions and many other things.
He said;
“I can tell you where I think we have not done as we had hoped, and I can tell where we had outperformed in the areas where we had done extremely well.
“You cannot talk about what this administration had done without factoring the contexts within which it operated. For example, we are talking about an administration of the last seven years. They dealt with two economic recessions — one of which was global — and a once-in-a-century global pandemic, where we saw oil prices hit as low as 10 dollar per barrel, where countries were shut down.
“We understand that there are these peculiarities that any honest assessment must factor in when we make this assessment.
“With a consistently low oil price from 2016 to 2022, we have been able to construct a high-speed rail line of 326km that had been abandoned since 1987.”
When asked to rate the performance of the Buhari administration, Ajuri said;
“If you are asking me a straightforward question of whether I believe that President Muhammadu Buhari administration has performed well, given all of the factors that I have mentioned and those that I have not mentioned yet, I will tell you with an emphatic ‘yes’, that he has done well.”
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