An immediate past presidential aide, Laolu Akande, on Thursday, said ex-President Muhamamdu Buhari had better grip of things during his first term as democratically elected President than in his second term between May 2019 and May 2023.
Akande, who spoke on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme, also said Buhari’s movement of the National Social Investment Programmes from the presidency to a newly created “humongous” Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development didn’t work out well.
The former presidential spokesperson was commenting on the launch of a book, ‘Working with Buhari: Reflections of A Special Adviser, Media, and Publicity (2015-2023)’ authored by ex-presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, in Abuja on Tuesday.
According to Akande, “We can take the witness account of Mr Femi Adesina to the bank. That was what he witnessed for eight years. There may be other perspectives that may not be in the story,” he said, adding that “President Buhari is actually a very amiable person, you can’t be in his presence and not laugh.”
However, Akande, who is now a public affairs analyst and host of Inside Sources With Laolu Akande, a talk show on Channels Television every Friday, did not agree with some of the decisions taken by Buhari while in office.
Akande said, “What I have found in the last eight years is that the personality of the principal, of the person who is number one, has to be a certain kind of personality but more than that, is the will and the capacity to deliver.
“I think President Buhari between 2015 and 2019 had a better grip of things than between 2019 and 2023. I think he made some strategic decisions that I don’t agree with such as the decision, for instance, to create this humongous ministry – Humanitarian Affairs – where he put social investment.”
According to him, Buhari took the programme from the folks who had done an excellent job between 2016 and 2019 and had won accolades all over locally and internationally. “You took it from them,” he said, adding that “It was a very tense situation”.
“If you are going to do that, you don’t have that kind of sharp disconnection because it was a sharp disconnection between the people who were handling it from 2016 and 2019.
“I think the President was trying to say that let’s institutionalise this in a ministry but there was no handshake between those who were handling it and the new ministry.”
The National Social Investment Office (NSIO) was created in 2016 and was put under the supervision of then VP Osinbajo. The programmes under the NSIP involved four broad programmes (N-Power, Conditional Cash Transfers, National Home-Grown School Feeding and Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programmes). They were uniquely targeted towards different subgroups of Nigerians for empowerment and impacted over 12 million direct beneficiaries and over 30 million indirect beneficiaries.
However, mid-2019, then President Buhari moved the programmes to a new ministry – humanitarian affairs, which has been embroiled in all kinds of fraud of late.
Ex-minister Sadiya Umar-Farouq and her successor Betta Edu are being probed by anti-graft agencies for various alleged financial malfeasance during their separate stewardship of the Humanitarian Affairs Ministry. Umar-Farouq is being investigated for alleged N37.1 billion money laundering while Edu is in a N585m disbursement mess.
Also, sacked National Coordinator of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIPA), Halima Shehu, is also being probed for alleged embezzlement of N44.8bn, with N39.8 billion out of N44.8billion recovered from her.