The Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris
Ngige, has stated that “job seekers”, who lost
out in the bid to become ministers, are the ones
piling pressure on President Muhammadu Buhari,
to change his economic team. Speaking with newsmen in Enugu at the
weekend, the Minister stated that calls for a new
economic team to steer the country out of
recession is propelled by job seekers and echoed
by their friends in the media. He disagreed with comments in some circles that
the President should change his economic team
as a result of an alleged inability of the federal
government to pilot the nation out of the current
economic recession.
Ngige argued that this country entered recession
a long time ago before the Buhari government
came on board but nobody noticed it because of
the huge foreign reserves accumulated by
former President Olusegun Obasanjo, which has
now shrunk to $21billion as a result of the crash in oil prices. According to him, “Under the previous
administration, the oil price was about $115 per
barrel and the country exhausted its 2.2 million
barrels daily quota of crude oil export. “But when this government came, the price of
oil dropped to as low as $30 per barrel. It later
came to $50 per barrel, but because of activities
of those blowing up oil pipelines in Niger Delta,
we could not export our daily quota of 2.2
million barrels. We are now exporting about 1.2 million barrels,” Ngige said.
