Garba Shehu, former Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to ex-President Muhammadu Buhari, has said his principal inherited the worst economy than any Nigerian president.
Mr Garba made this known during an interview with BBC Hausa in Kaduna while reacting to viral news report that quoted his former colleague, Femi Adesina, as saying Mr Buhari has regretted some of his actions while in office.
According to him, Mr Buhari did not regret any decisions he took during his tenure as the country’s president.
He said: “The newspaper that carried the story wanted to attract people’s attention and make sales. If not, what’s it that was done that would lead to regrets?
“Therefore, the talk of regret does not even arise.”
According to him, all the decisions taken by the Buhari administration were for the interest of Nigerians and not personal gains.
While defending his principal, Mr Shehu said the administration recorded significant gains across different sectors of the economy.
“But that’s how things used to be; once an elephant is down, people will bring out their knives and struggle for a cut.
“Our leader, Muhammadu Buhari, has done well. And if people fail to talk about that now, perhaps they will talk about that in the future. They would be fair to him and talk about the good things he did in the country,” he stressed.
On the allegation that Nigeria was left with many challenges by Mr Buhari’s administration, leading to the current socioeconomic problems in the country, Mr Shehu noted that it was natural for any administration to inherit challenges.
He said: “If there were hardships or problems, these should be looked into, to know how they came about.
“There is no administration in this country that found itself in economic problems like Buhari’s because of our dependence on oil and prices, which went down.
“We also had the coronavirus pandemic. Nations shut their doors and the economy plummeted. But, Alhamdulillah, Buhari brought the Nigerian economy out of that crisis,” he added.
