Festus Keyamo, a spokesman for the Tinubu-Shettima presidential campaign, claimed on Friday that recessions prevented Bola Tinubu from delivering on his commitment to fund student loans while the All Progressives Congress (APC) was running for office in 2015.
As a guest on a Channels TV programme, Keyamo discussed the points made in the APC presidential candidate's newly issued manifesto.
When questioned about the unfulfilled student loan pledge in the manifesto after Tinubu's pledge from 2015, Keyamo claimed that the recessions the nation had after the APC assumed power also made it difficult for the government to carry out the pledge.
“I think the roadmap and foundation is being laid, let me tell you why, you see because you also need to ramp up revenue first and make them available for students to tap into that revenue base and that is why we are talking about revenue now, how to ramp up those revenues,” he said.
“In 2014, no less a person that Okonjo-Iweala who was then Minister of Finance told everyone that we are headed to recession, so we did not give that excuse, it was the PDP government that said at the time they were leaving that the country was on a downward slide towards recession and that was in 2013 and 2014.
“Now what happened therefore was that we came in and met that recession and then the country slid into recession but because of the deftness of the handling of the economy we came out of that recession faster than even the IMF predicted and also the second recession, we came out faster than they predicted.”
Keyamo also added low oil production to the factors that ensured that his party didn’t deliver on its promise, but maintained that the dream to fulfil them remains alive.
“Then we now met low oil production that dropped to 700 barrels per day at times 600 barrels per day when we should have been on 2.3 million barrels per day, we met those problems on ground, so there was a problem of revenue, but the dream remained alive. The dream to fulfil these promises are still alive today as we begin to ramp up our revenues and rescue the economy where PDP left the economy and that is where we are now,” the APC campaign spokesperson added.
When asked if Tinubu will fulfil the promise this time around Keyamo said, “Because we are now talking about a situation where we have laid a foundation to the point where we are going to now have more revenues and the partway to have those revenues have been clearly laid, you cannot meet those expectations without revenues and I just told you that vagaries of local oil disruptions and the international headwinds that we have had to face disrupted revenues, so it is a matter of fact that I am stating.”
On whether Tinubu will apologise to Nigerians on the inability to fulfil the earlier promise, Keyamo replied, “No, do you have to apologise to perhaps a force majeure? When you have a force majeure you don’t apologise.”