FEDERAL MINISTRY OF WORKS AND HOUSING
PRESS RELEASE
The Minister of Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola SAN on Friday clarified the statement mischievously attributed to him in a section of the media as saying that Nigeria’s achievements in Infrastructure has surpassed that of the United States.
Responding to a journalist’s question on the issue during an inspection tour of the ongoing rehabilitation of the Abuja- Kaduna- Zaria -Kano Dual Carriageway Sections I to III, Fashola said:”The first point to make is that I didn’t say that Nigeria’s infrastructure was better than America’s infrastructure because certainly anybody who knows what he is doing will know that America is a much richer nation, their infrastructure is well ahead of Nigeria.”
“What I was talking about at the presentation with the All Progressives Congress, (APC) Youth Ministerial Conference was about the challenges of infrastructure and that it is universal, every country commits to infrastructure as a legitimate way to create work, to grow the economy and distribute wealth as we have seen here.”
“That’s the first point I was making,& that in a democracy you always need the Parliament to authorize infrastructure spending and so I was making the comparison that Buhari has been able to get his Parliament to authorize his spending, and that is why we were able to gather (at Special Ministerial Conversational Conference). But that the U.S government is struggling to get authorisation from their parliament to start what we are already doing. I didn’t say our infrastructure is better than theirs,” he said.
According to the Minister, the deliberate misreporting of his clear statement of fact and the almost spontaneous orchestration of reactions based on the misrepresentation on the social media should send a clear warning to right thinking& well-meaning Nigerians about opposition campaign.
