Jigawa State governor, Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, has pleaded with Nigerians to support the economic policies of President Muhammadu Buhari, stressing that the Nigerian economy was already on a stretcher when the last PDP administration was unseated in 2015.

The governor was speaking in an interview with DailyTrust newspaper, in Abuja yesterday.

He said, “By 2015, the country’s economy was on life support and was literally handed over to the APC government on a stretcher.”

“If you bother to add up all the billions that were stolen in the name of security and the rot in the oil sector, you will appreciate the fact that these people were not running a government in the last eight years but simply supervising the organized sharing of public funds amongst themselves.

“It is actually a miracle that the Buhari administration has been able to come this far without a complete collapse of the economy and the government, such as we are seeing in Venezuela, which had the same toxic combination of a collapsing mono economy and an uncaring administration”.

“People tend to forget that the economic downturn actually started manifesting in 2014, due to a growing mismatch between the profligate and reckless spending by the previous government, fuelled by high oil prices and the resultant shock to the system when prices started to fall.

“Nigeria’s case was worsened by the fact that with the falling oil prices, our production targets were affected by militant activities in the Niger Delta and outright theft of the nation’s crude oil on a massive scale, perpetrated with the full backing of government officials.”