Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on media and publicity, Malama Garba Shehu has described as prosperous, the news going round that President Buhari called all Nigerians criminals in the recent interview he granted London Telegraph newspaper.
In a statement today, Garba Shehu emphasized: “it is preposterous for anyone to imagine that the President of Nigeria would describe all the citizens of the country he leads as criminals, when he himself is a Nigerian–obviously not a criminal–and when there are many Nigerians of honest living making their country proud all over the world.”
He stressed that the various interpretations of President Buhari’s comments in an interview granted to the UK’s Telegraph newspaper on February 5, 2016 were unfortunate even as he noted that the wave of negative reactions to the President’s remarks about the reputation of Nigerians abroad was as a result of an incomplete understanding of his point.
“President Buhari was asked about the flood of migrants from Nigeria and the fraudulent applications for asylum put in by people desperate to leave their motherland at any cost, and it was this question that elicited his response,” he said, encouraging Nigerians to avail themselves of a full text of the interview, which has now been made available on the Telegraph’s website.
“Unfortunately, there are also Nigerians giving their country a bad image abroad, and it is to those Nigerians that the President referred in his comments,” he said, adding that people may play politics and online games with the President’s comments, but the fact of the matter remains that Nigeria’s reputation abroad has been severely damaged by her own citizens.
“These Nigerians who leave their country to go and make mischief on foreign shores, have given the rest of us a bad reputation that we daily struggle to overcome,” Garba Shehu said, even as he recalled the many efforts of President Buhari to clean up the image of Nigeria, such as the war on corruption.
“President Buhari is very aware of the problems the people of Nigeria face both at home and abroad, and he is not shying away from admitting them even as he focuses on solutions to bring them to a permanent end.” [myad]
