Femi Adesina, a former media aide to ex-President Muhammadu Buhari said the former President regretted some of the decisions he took while in office and felt he could have done some things better.
The ex-presidential spokesman stated this while speaking at a programme tagged ‘Media Dialogue with Femi Adesina’, organised by the Association of Veteran Journalists in Osun State.
According to him, before Buhari left office he had a two-hour chat with him, during which he asked all manner of questions.
“There is no living human being that will not regret certain things. It is one of the questions I asked the President.
“Before we left office, I sat with him for about two hours and I asked him every question under the sun; there was no question I didn’t ask him. There were things he (Buhari) felt could have been done better,” Mr Adesina said.
While defending some of the policies of the previous administration, Mr Adesina said the Naira redesign policy of the Buhari administration was in the interest of the country.
“You will recall that even during that time, there was no kidnapping. I remember some people went to kidnap an APC chairman or is it secretary in Kano.
“After holding him for three days and nobody was calling to ask how much they will collect because there was no cash, they just slapped him three times and told him to go.
“Even kidnappers were out of business because there was no naira and do you know that we have a cleaner election because of that policy?
“Nine serving governors couldn’t go to the Senate. They contested but lost. Have you ever seen a governor who will contest an election and will not win?
“But because there was no money to spread around, they couldn’t win. The policy was not bad in its entirety. There were issues with it but it was not bad in its entirety,” he said.
Speaking on his challenges as a presidential media aide, Mr Adesina accused some section of the media of always deliberately quoting him out of context.
“My biggest challenge during the eight years that I served with former President Muhammadu Buhari was the fact that a section of the media deliberately quoted me out of context.
“I eventually grew out of it and got used to the antics. Even while I had a television interview, it was turned upside down in the papers deliberately to make me an enemy of the public, but I outgrew it and it did not affect my duty throughout my tenure,” he said.
