Presidency defends Buhari’s nine-point agenda for three years

The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, on Monday, defended the nine priority areas that the President Muhammadu Buhari said his regime would pay attention to in his remaining three years in office.

Shehu, in a statement made available to journalists, was reacting to an editorial written by a national newspaper on the matter.

The newspaper had recalled that Buhari’s regime set three priority areas for itself in 2015, noting that if the regime made no headway with a three-point agenda in five years, a nine-point agenda to be pursued in three years looks like a tall order.

But Shehu said the key themes of an election campaign were not the same as the priorities that are then set, nor policies that are required to be developed and implemented when a party and President are in office.

Those, he said, depended on many factors including the true state of the treasury when they arrive and the capacity of the supporting infrastructure along with the tools required to deliver on the elected government’s agenda.

According to him, “In addition, the nature of events means that no government elected for two terms could possibly justify continuing only to deliver the agenda it set in the first election campaign that brought it to office some five years previously. The society is dynamic and so is governance.

“All of these factors, and the fact that governments must renew themselves and their ideas whilst in office mean the President Muhammadu Buhari administration is right to set an enhanced series of objectives for the coming years.

“This does not mean that the initial three priorities which led to the historic changing of power through the ballot box from an incumbent to the opposition for the very first time in 2015 are in any way abandoned. They are not. Those three priorities are themes which can easily be mapped to the nine priorities.

“The President’s commitment to fighting corruption cannot be seen more strongly than through investigations underway into the affairs of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission”.