Acting President Yemi Osinbajo on Monday held a nation-wide broadcast to mark the anniversary of Democracy Day in Nigeria.
He stood in for President Muhammadu Buhari who has been away in London on an indefinite medical vacation.
Read the full text of his address below:
DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO,
SAN, THE ACTING PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA,
COMMEMORATING THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF THE BUHARI ADMINISTRATION, MAY
29, 2017
Dear Nigerians, I bring you good wishes from President Muhammadu
Buhari, GCFR, who as we all know is away from the country on medical
vacation.
1. Today marks the second anniversary of our assumption of office. We
must thank the Almighty God not only for preserving our lives to
celebrate this second anniversary, but for giving us hope, strength and
confidence as we faced the challenges of the past two years.
2. Our administration outlined three specific areas for our immediate
intervention on assumption of office: these were Security, Corruption
and the Economy.
3. In the Northeast of our country, the terrorist group Boko Haram
openly challenged the sovereignty and continued existence of the state,
killing, maiming,and abducting, causing the displacement of the largest
number of our citizens in recent history. Beyond the North East they
extended their mindless killings, as far away as Abuja, Kano And Kaduna.
4. But with new leadership and renewed confidence our gallant
military immediately began to put Boko Haram on the back foot. We have
restored broken-down relations with our neighbours, Chad, Cameroon and
Niger – allies without whom the war against terror would have been
extremely difficult to win. We have re-organized and equipped our Armed
Forces, and inspired them to heroic feats; we have also revitalized the
regional Multinational Joint Task Force, by providing the required
funding and leadership.
5. The positive results are clear for all to see. In the last two
years close to one million displaced persons have returned home. 106 of
our daughters from Chibok have regained their freedom, after more than
two years in captivity, in addition to the thousands of other captives
who have since tasted freedom.
6. Schools, hospitals and businesses are springing back to life
across the Northeast, especially in Borno State, the epicentre of the
crisis. Farmers are returning to the farms from which they fled in the
wake of Boko Haram. Finally, our people are getting a chance to begin
the urgent task of rebuilding their lives.
7. Across the country, in the Niger Delta, and in parts of the North
Central region, we are engaging with local communities, to understand
their grievances, and to create solutions that respond to these
grievances adequately and enduringly.
8. President Buhari’s New Vision for the Niger Delta is a
comprehensive peace, security and development plan that will ensure that
the people benefit fully from the wealth of the region, and we have
seen to it that it is the product of deep and extensive consultations,
and that it has now moved from idea to execution. Included in that New
Vision is the long-overdue environmental clean-up of the Niger Delta
beginning with Ogoni-land, which we launched last year.
9. More recent threats to security such as the herdsmen clashes with
farmers in many parts of the country sometimes leading to fatalities and
loss of livelihoods and property have also preoccupied our security
structures. We are working with State governments, and tasking our
security agencies with designing effective strategies and interventions
that will bring this menace to an end. We are determined to ensure that
anyone who uses violence, or carries arms without legal authority is
apprehended and sanctioned.
10. In the fight against corruption, we have focused on bringing
persons accused of corruption to justice. We believe that the looting of
public resources that took place in the past few years has to be
accounted for. Funds appropriated to build roads, railway lines, and
power plants, and to equip the military, that had been stolen or
diverted into private pockets, must be retrieved and the culprits
brought to justice. Many have said that the process is slow, and that is
true, corruption has fought back with tremendous resources and our
system of administration of justice has been quite slow. But the good
news for justice is that our law does not recognize a time bar for the
prosecution of corruption and other crimes, and we will not relent in
our efforts to apprehend and bring corruption suspects to justice. We
are also re-equipping our prosecution teams, and part of the expected
judicial reforms is to dedicate some specific courts to the trial of
corruption cases.
11. We are also institutionalizing safeguards and deterrents. We have
expanded the coverage of the Treasury Single Account (TSA). We have
introduced more efficient accounting and budgeting systems across the
Federal Government. We have also launched an extremely successful
Whistleblower Policy.
12. The Efficiency Unit of the Federal Ministry of Finance has
succeeded in plugging leakages amounting to billions of naira, over the
last two years. We have ended expensive and much-abused fertilizer and
petrol subsidy regimes.
13. We have taken very seriously our promise to save and invest for
the future, even against the backdrop of our revenue challenges, and we
have in the last two years added US$500m to our Sovereign Wealth Fund
and US$87m to the Excess Crude Account. This is the very opposite of the
situation before now, when rising oil prices failed to translate to
rising levels of savings and investment.
14. Admittedly, the economy has proven to be the biggest challenge of
all. Let me first express just how concerned we have been, since this
administration took office, about the impact of the economic
difficulties on our citizens.
15. Through no fault of theirs, some companies shut down their
operations, others downsized; people lost jobs, had to endure rising
food prices. In some States civil servants worked months on end without
the guarantee of a salary, even as rents and school fees and other
expenses continued to show up like clockwork.
16. We have been extremely mindful of the many sacrifices that you
have had to make over the last few years. And for this reason this
administration’s work on the economic front has been targeted at a
combination of short-term interventions to cushion the pain, as well as
medium to long term efforts aimed at rebuilding an economy that is no
longer helplessly dependent on the price of crude oil.
17. Those short-term interventions include putting together a series
of bailout packages for our State Governments, to enable them bridge
their salary shortfalls – an issue the President has consistently
expressed his concerns about. We also began the hard work of laying out a
framework for our Social Intervention Programme, the most ambitious in
the history of the country.
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1. One of the first tasks of the Cabinet and the Economic Management
Team was to put together a Strategic Implementation Plan for the 2016
budget, targeting initiatives that would create speedy yet lasting
impact on the lives of Nigerians.
1. Indeed, much of 2016 was spent clearing the mess we inherited and
putting the building blocks together for the future of our dreams;
laying a solid foundation for the kind of future that you deserve as
citizens of Nigeria.
1. In his Budget Presentation Speech to the National Assembly last
December, President Buhari outlined our Economic Agenda in detail, and
assured that 2017 -would be the year in which you would begin to see
tangible benefits of all the planning and preparation work. It is my
pleasure to note that in the five months since he delivered that speech,
we have seen tremendous progress, as promised.
1. Take the example of our Social Investment Programme, which kicked
off at the end of 2016. Its Home Grown School Feeding component is now
feeding more than 1 million primary school children across seven states
and would be feeding three million by the end of the year. N-Power,
another component has engaged 200,000 unemployed graduates – none of
whom needed any ‘connections’ to be selected. Beneficiaries are already
telling the stories of how these initiatives have given them a fresh
start in their lives.
2. Micro credit to a million artisans, traders and market men and
women has begun. While conditional cash transfers to eventually reach a
million of the poorest and most vulnerable households has also begun.
3. Road and power projects are ongoing in every part of the country.
In rail, we are making progress with our plans to attract hundreds of
millions of dollars in investment to upgrade the existing 3,500km
narrow-gauge network. We have also in 2017 flagged-off construction work
on the Lagos-Ibadan leg of our standard-gauge network, and are close to
completing the first phase of Abuja’s Mass Transit Rail System.
4. In that Budget speech in December, the President announced the
take-off of the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative. Today, five months
on, that Initiative – the product of an unprecedented bilateral
cooperation with the Government of Morocco – has resulted in the
revitalisation of 11 blending plants across the country, the creation of
50,000 direct and indirect jobs so far, and in the production of
300,000 metric tonnes of NPK fertilizer, which is being sold to farmers
at prices significantly lower than what they paid last year. By the end
of 2017, that Fertilizer Initiative would have led to foreign exchange
savings of US$200 million; and subsidy savings of 60 billion naira.
5. The Initiative is building on the solid gains of the Anchor
Borrowers Programme, launched in 2015 to support our rice and wheat
farmers, as part of our move towards guaranteeing food security for
Nigeria.
6. All of this is evidence that we are taking very seriously our
ambition of agricultural self-sufficiency. I am delighted to note that
since 2015 our imports of rice have dropped by 90 percent, while
domestic production has almost tripled. Our goal is to produce enough
rice to meet local demand by 2019. In April, the President launched our
Economic Recovery and Growth Plan which built on the foundations laid by
the Strategic implementation Plan of 2016. The plan has set forth a
clear vision for the economic development of Nigeria. I will come back
to this point presently.
7. Another highlight of the President’s Budget Speech was our work
around the Ease of Doing Business reforms. As promised we have since
followed up with implementation and execution. I am pleased to note that
we are now seeing verifiable progress across several areas, ranging
from new Visa on Arrival scheme, to reforms at our ports and regulatory
agencies.
8. The President also promised that 2017 would see the rollout of
Executive Orders to facilitate government approvals, support procurement
of locally made goods, and improve fiscal responsibility. We have kept
that promise. This month we issued three Executive Orders to make it
easier for citizens to get the permits and licenses they require for
their businesses, to mandate Government agencies to spend more of their
budgets on locally produced goods, and to promote budget transparency
and efficiency. The overarching idea is to make Government Agencies and
Government budgets work more efficiently for the people.
9. The impact of our Ease of Doing Business work is gradually being
felt by businesses small and large; its successful take-off has allowed
us to follow up with the MSME Clinics -our Small Business support
programme, which has taken us so far to Aba, Sokoto, Jos, Katsina, and
we expect to be in all other states in due course.
10. Let me note, at this point, that several of our Initiatives are
targeted at our young people, who make up most of our population. From
N-Power, to the Technology Hubs being developed nationwide, to
innovation competitions such as the Aso Villa Demo Day, and our various
MSME support schemes, we will do everything to nurture the immense
innovative and entrepreneurial potential of our young people. We are a
nation of young people, and we will ensure that our policies and
programmes reflect this.
11. One of the highlights of our Power Sector Recovery Programme,
which we launched in March, is a N701 billion Naira Payment Assurance
Scheme that will resolve the financing bottlenecks that have until now
constrained the operations of our gas suppliers and generation
companies. Let me assure that you will soon begin to see the positive
impact of these steps.
12. Our Solid Minerals Development Fund has also now taken off, in
line with our commitment to developing the sector. Because of our
unerring focus on Solid Minerals development over the last two years,
the sector has, alongside Agriculture, seen impressive levels of growth –
in spite of the recession.
13. On the whole, just as the President promised in the Budget
Speech, these early months of 2017 have seen the flowering of the early
fruit of all the hard work of our first eighteen months.
14. We opened the year with an overwhelmingly successful Eurobond
Offer – evidence of continuing investor interest in Nigeria. We have
also launched the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) 2017-2020, to
build on the gains of last year’s Strategic Implementation Plan. And
the implementation of our 2017 Budget, which will soon be signed into
law, will bring added impetus to our ongoing economic recovery. In the
2016 Budget we spent 1.2 Trillion Naira on infrastructure projects,
another milestone in the history of this country. Our 2017 Budget will
double that investment.
15. That budget also provides for substantial investment to implement
the rollout of Industrial Parks and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), as
well as our Social Housing Programme. The Industrial Parks and Economic
Zones will fulfill our ambition of making Nigeria a manufacturing hub,
while the Family Home Fund of our Social Housing Programme will provide
inexpensive mortgages for low-income individuals and families across the
country.
16. These plans offer yet more evidence that we are ramping up the
pace of work; the work of fulfilling all that we promised. In the next
two years we will build on the successes of the last two. We have
demonstrated a willingness to learn from our mistakes and to improve on
our successes. The critical points that we must address fully in the
next two years are : Agriculture and food security, Energy, (power and
Petroleum,) Industrialization and Transport infrastructure. Every step
of the way we will be working with the private sector, giving them the
necessary incentives and creating an environment to invest and do
business.
17. Our vision is for a country that grows what it eats and produces
what it consumes. It is for a country that no longer has to import
petroleum products, and develops a lucrative petrochemical industry.
Very importantly it is for a country whose fortunes are no longer tied
to the price of a barrel of crude, but instead to the boundless talent
and energy of its people, young and old, male and female as they invest
in diverse areas of the economy.
18. And that vision is also for a country where the wealth of the
many will no longer be stolen by or reserved for a few; and where the
impunity of corruption – whether in the public or private sectors – will
no longer be standard operating practice; a land rid of bandits and
terrorists.
19. As citizens you all deserve a country that works, not merely for
the rich or connected, but for everyone. And our promise to you is that
we will, with your support and cooperation, take every step needed to
create that country of our dreams.
20. We also know that this journey will of necessity take time. But
we will not succumb to the temptation to take short-cuts that ultimately
complicate the journey. We did not find ourselves in crises overnight,
and we simply do not expect overnight solutions to our challenges.
21. The most important thing is that we are on the right path, and we
will not deviate from it, even in the face of strong temptation to
choose temporary gain over long-term benefit. As the President has
summed it up: “The old Nigeria is slowly but surely disappearing, and a
new era is rising.”
22. And so we commemorate this second anniversary of our
administration with confidence and optimism. I firmly believe that we
have put the most difficult phase behind us; and we are witnesses to the
ever-increasing intensity of the light at the end of the tunnel. We ask
for your continued cooperation and support, to enable us realize all
our best intentions and ambitions for Nigeria. On our part We will
continue to carry you along on this journey, speak to you, explain the
challenges, and share our Vision.
23. And while we all daily pre-occupy ourselves with pursuing the
Nigerian Dream – which is the desire to better our lives and
circumstances vigorously and honestly – it is inevitable that grievances
and frustrations will arise from time to time.
24. This is normal. What is not normal, or acceptable, is employing
these frustrations as justification for indulging in discrimination or
hate speech or hateful conduct of any kind, or for seeking to undermine
by violent or other illegal means the very existence of the sovereign
entity that has brought us all together as brothers and sisters and
citizens.
25. Nigeria belongs to all of us. No one person or group of persons
is more important or more entitled than the other in this space that we
all call home. And we have a responsibility to live in peace and harmony
with one another, to seek peaceful and constitutional means of
expressing our wishes and desires, and to resist all who might seek to
sow confusion and hatred for their own selfish interests.
26.Before I end this speech, let me ask for your continued prayers
for the restoration to full health and strength and the safe return of
our President.
27. I congratulate all of you on today’s commemoration of this
important day in the democratic calendar our country. Nigeria is on a
journey of greatness, and together we shall arrive at the destination of
our dreams.
You feel like throwing in the towel but my
desire to play football is above everything,' he told Spanish radio
station Cadena Ser.
I remember I had a bad spell with a back problem but this is worse because it doesn't depend on me.
And Arsenal confirmed football's worst-kept secret on Wednesday. 
Wenger gave a detailed interview to Arsenal Player about his decision to stay at the club
The Argentina striker, who cost £38million
from Atletico Madrid in 2011, is under contract until 2020 but has been
linked with a return to Spain.
Back then United were vulnerable as the
player only had a year left on his contract and could have left for
nothing a year later.
Antoine Griezmann
