The Federal Government on Thursday descended on critics of its frequent request for fresh loans describing them as insincere.
The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, spoke for the government during a townhall meeting in Maiduguri, Borno State to address vandalism of power and telecommunications infrastructure.
Mohammed said the critics were members of previous administrations who ‘performed abysmally in terms of modernising our infrastructure, even when they served at a time when our earnings were multiples of what we get today.”
He said that government was not borrowing for recurrent expenditure or to pay salaries but to build world-class infrastructure that would benefit generations of Nigerians.
According to him, based on the two townhall meetings held in Abuja on June 7 and July 5 2021, the situation regarding the wanton destruction of public infrastructure was worse than government had imagined.
He said, “For example, we were told that it would cost the Federal Government N3.8billion to repair just four bridges that were damaged by vandals and petrol-laden tankers.
“That’s a huge amount that could have been used to build new infrastructure.”