The Managing Director, Cowry Asset Management Limited, Mr. Johnson Chukwu has criticized the move by President Muhammadu Buhari to recover all the looted funds by the immediate past administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan saying that it should not be the priority of the president at the moment.
Speaking in an interview with Primetime Reporters in Lagos, Chukwu however stated that if President Buhari has evidence that the said public officials had looted public funds, he had a legal mandate to recover those funds.
“But I believe that that should not take too much of the president’s attention because there are lots of issues begging for attention. If there are issues of fraud, stolen of our common wealth, the President has a duty to recover those funds but I don’t think that should be priority number one today. It is important, it is a necessity but it should not rank as number one priority for the President”, he said.
He informed that policy direction should be the priority which includes stating in clear terms his policy direction towards fighting insurgency, in improving infrastructure, limiting the opportunity for malfeasance and stealing of public funds should rather be the priority so that the opportunity of those that abuse the common wealth of the nation would be highly limited in as much as he was going to go after those who did that and punish them.
On the President’s promise to publish the state of the nation’s economy for the public to have a grasp of, the financial expert averred that the foreign investors already have a fair knowledge of the state of the Nigerian economy which was why the Naira was suffering.
According to him,” In as much as he is saying okay, let the world know what we are inheriting, maybe that may be the purpose but the basic thing is this, we should define what is priority to the country. Like I said earlier, the President should focus more attention to those priorities. We need to know how he is going to reduce the problem of insurgency, we need to know how he is going to bring our economy back to 7% which is gone up to about 9%, we need to know how we are going to create employment and take the teeming unemployed youths out of the labour market.
“We need to address, how do we improve the quality of our infrastructure, how do we improve the quality of our education so that our graduates can become innovative and create the next world. Those are the areas, we have improved health care, reduce maternal and infant mortality rate, how do we build modern infrastructure, how do we reduce the opportunities for corruption in the country.
“I think those are the areas the President should focus attention and I think they handful to engae the mind and the attention of the President”.
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