Anyone assessing Buhari’s government must consider impact of recession, COVID-19, says presidential aide

The senior special assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on public affairs, Ajuri Ngelale, has said any “honest assessment” of his principal’s administration must consider the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recessions.

Ngelale spoke on Thursday during an interview on Channels Television.

With months to the end of the Buhari administration, there have been conversations on the performance of the All Progressives Congress-led government based on the promises made to Nigerians before the 2015 elections.

Speaking on the development, Ngelale said the present administration cannot be assessed without consideration of the “contexts” of governance.

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.”

Asked to rate the performance of the Buhari administration, the presidential aide said the government has done well.

“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,” he added.