Ahmed Joda, a permanent secretary from 1966-78, chaired Buhari’s Transition Committee, which interfaced with GEJ’s team. In an interview with Daily Trust today, when Joda, who was the chairman of the transition committee in 1979 when
General Obasanjo handed over to Shagari, was asked what he’d consider to be the greatest challenges he faced in carrying out the assignment, he said, “Nigeria should be ready to face a lot of challenges.
The biggest in my view is corruption; it is everywhere. There is no department, no ministry that can be said to be free of corruption. There is nowhere that fraud does not take place on a daily basis. It has become embedded in the minds of the people because the rule books have been thrown away and everybody is doing what they like.
I often wondered, since the beginning of this exercise, if the PDP had won the election what would have been the fate of Nigeria. It would have been more difficult for them to face the challenge because they had been telling people that everything was good; the roads are good. They were not talking about the absence of light in the house, but they were talking about the capacity to produce electricity is 12k megawatts out of which only 5k could be released.
But even out of this 5k at the time they were doing the handing over notes only 1.3k megawatts were being generated, but they were talking about 35,000km of distribution lines and so on, but nobody told us the real problem – that there is no gas, or there is no capacity to transmit the electricity that could be generated; that even when it is delivered at the point of distribution the distribution system is so weak that it can’t take it.
I personally didn’t know that until I got into this exercise. We were told at the beginning of the exercise that the government was in deficit of at least N1.3 trillion and by the end people were talking about N7 trillion; everything is in a state of collapse. Everywhere is in a mess and these things have to be fixed.”….. ppl r already hoping GEJ wld come back as d president in 2019 to fix them all……