The Presidency has rebuked the Financial Times’ Africa Editor, David Pilling, over an article on President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration published on January 31, 2021.
In an open letter to The Editor, Financial Times, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said; “The caricature of a government sleepwalking into disaster (What is Nigeria’s government for? January 31, 2022) is predictable from a correspondent who jets briefly in and out of Nigeria on the same British Airways flight he so criticises.
Further reacting to Pilling’s article, the presidential spokesperson wrote on Sunday thus; “We wish to correct the wrong perceptions contained in the article “What is Nigeria’s Government For” by David Pilling, Financial Times (UK), January 31, 2022, noting that the article deliberately left out the “security gains” of the current government.
According to Garba’s letter, Pilling “highlights rising banditry in my country as proof of such slumber. What he leaves out are the security gains made over two presidential terms. The terror organisation, Boko Haram used to administer an area the size of Belgium at the inauguration; now, they control no territory.
“The first comprehensive plan to deal with decades-old clashes between nomadic herders and sedentary farmers – experienced across the width of the Sahel – has been introduced: pilot ranches are reducing the competition for water and land that drove past tensions.
“Banditry grew out of such clashes. Criminal gangs took advantage of the instability, flush with guns that flooded the region following the Western-triggered implosion of Libya.”
“The situation is grave. Yet as with other challenges, it is one that the government will face down”, the presidential aide assured.
In his article titled; ‘What is Nigeria For?’ Pilling had slammed President Buhari for overseeing what id described as “two terms of the economic slump, rising debt and a calamitous increase in kidnapping and banditry.”
He had also written thus: “On the British Airways flight between London and Nigeria’s administrative capital of Abuja, one of the airline’s most profitable routes, nearly all the space is taken up with flatbeds. The unfortunate few making their way to a crunched economy section at the back must trudge through row after row of business class.
“Evidently, there is plenty of money to be made in Abuja’s corridors of power. Nigeria’s economy may be flat on its back, but the political elite flying to and from London will spend the flight flat on theirs, too.
“Next year, many of the members of government will change, though not necessarily the bureaucracy behind it. Campaigning has already begun for presidential elections that in February 2023 will draw the curtain on eight years of the administration of Muhammadu Buhari, on whose somnolent watch Nigeria has sleepwalked closer to disaster.”
