Ismail Ahmed, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Special Assistant on the National Social Development Program, claimed that one of the administration’s accomplishments was the Federal Government’s capacity to pay employees’ salaries during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Ahmed revealed this when discussing the recently published “Renewed Hope” manifesto by the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council with Arise TV.
The APC presidential campaign council’s secretary of policy research and strategy remarked that the performance of the APC administration should not be evaluated in isolation but rather in light of the circumstances in which it found itself.
He said that the Buhari-led administration had performed admirably, particularly in terms of its capacity to make payroll during the worldwide pandemic of 2020, when even stronger economies were having trouble.
He stated:
“We are going to discuss what the APC government has accomplished in light of the historical environment in which we found ourselves in 2015 and in comparison to the current state of affairs. Those are the challenges we encountered in government and the accomplishments of this administration.
“There were two worldwide meltdowns that killed prime ministers in even the so-called advanced nations, two global recessions, a global pandemic that slowed everyone down, and the collapse of nations like Venezuela that have greater oil reserves than Nigeria.
“And then there are nations like Nigeria, where the government continued to pay salaries throughout the year 2020 even though no one was going to work.
“Projects for economic and infrastructure development continued. We have accomplished a great deal of things. Among many other infrastructure development projects, the second Niger Bridge in the East is about to be commissioned.
So, if you’re talking about the goals we achieved as a government and how we were able to advance the nation, I believe we did quite well.
Paying salaries is thus an accomplishment given the situation this country was in during the global pandemic because so many other nations failed to do so.
