Toluwani Eniola
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.”
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