The All Progressives Congress, APC-led Federal Government is not focused on probing members of the party, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF, Mr. Babachir Lawal, has said.
In an interview with Vanguard,he affirmed that the government would, in the light of declining revenue, reprioritise the 2016 budget with emphasis on the administration’s priority projects and would not prioritise the constituency projects inputted by the National Assembly.
When asked if the president would start dealing with corrupt persons in APC, Lawal said: “Let us be very sincere and reasonable. Obviously, to my mind, the preponderance of corrupt people would be in the PDP for one reason; they have been in government for 16 years and they were the only ones enjoying the booty, and they were doing it in a flagrant manner.
“Tracing my own (political) genealogy for instance, from ANPP to CPC and now APC, we were not getting anything. Nobody was giving us contracts. PDP were the ones in government; they were the ones the president was approving money for sharing; they were the ones that took government money to fund their election”, he said.
Meanwhile, Lawal, in his first major interview since assuming office last August, also gave reasons for the failure to name ambassadorial nominees in certain states just as he justified the recent recruitment into the Federal Inland Revenue Service, FIRS and the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.
Lawal, in the interview, said the report of the 2014 National Conference organised by the Goodluck Jonathan administration was not a priority of the Muhammadu Buhari administration.
Saying Buhari was too busy to study the report of the National Conference, Lawal said: “The government has not taken a decision on the 2014 National Conference. I understand that some Nigerians want it implemented but the government has been too busy with key areas of governance to talk about an exercise that we thought was essentially diversionary and a sort of, maybe, a “job for the boys.”
“If you remember, it was reported that almost everybody in the committee got N7 million and we consider it essentially as job for the boys. They probably produced a document that is good and commendable but I mean, this government is too busy with very more vital areas of governance and we are not intending to spend our time reading reports.
“The exercise of governance is not about reading reports. The reports are here, so many volumes that, for example, it would take me like seven days to go through and I wonder what happens to my work while I am reading it; while the economy needs attention, unemployment is there, insecurity is there, people are blowing up pipelines and so on.”
