Bayo Onanuga blasts Muhammadu Buhari: Nigeria is doomed under you

Bayo Onanuga

Under you, Nigeria is doomed, Muhammadu Buhari, President of Nigeria has been told by Bayo

Onanuga, one of Nigeria’s most renowned media practitioners who once served in the Buhari administration as the MD, News Agency of Nigeria.

Onanuga however took his former boss to the cleaners through a post on his Facebook page as part of his own reaction to the trending Channels TV interview in which Buhari made comments on the nation which haven’t gone down well with most Nigerians.

Below is Onanuga’s post in verbatim.

President Buhari's response to the worsening economic indices in his recent Channels TV interview was just too simplistic. He wants all Nigerians to go back to the farm to make our economy robust again!

Mr. President, I beg to disagree. All Nigerians cannot be farmers, not now, not in the future. In advanced economies, in an age of mechanised, technology-driven agriculture, only an insignificant percentage of the population is directly involved with agriculture.

In America, it was just 1.3% in 2020 that was directly involved with agriculture. Another 8-9 % was involved in the value chain of agriculture. In Britain just 1.5% of the workforce are into agriculture. In Germany, it was even much lower, 1.169 % in 2020.

China with 1.4billion people provides an extreme ratio: 35 percent are involved in agriculture. India, almost having China's population size, also has 58% involved.

The truth is that our economy is largely undeveloped and is not creating enough opportunities for jobs. The schools are also not innovative in producing graduates who will be economic changers and who can create jobs along the agriculture value chain.

The schools are not producing graduates needed by the economy. We are breeding a mass of young, ill-educated, unemployable graduates and unleashing them into the society.

Your government is also not helping matters. With just 30% of budget devoted to capital and 70 percent to consumption, Nigeria is doomed with no hope of economic turnaround. Mr President should ask the Sheikhs in UAE how they built their economy with world standard infrastructure. They did it by devoting 80 percent of expenditure on capital and 20 percent on recurrent. We surely have a long way to go as at the moment. With soaring debt, we are simply eating our future today.