Opposition Peoples Democratic Party, on Friday, criticised the “35 second-term achievements” of the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.).

Buhari, who won his reelection in 2019 after defeating PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar, with about four million votes in the February 23 poll, had on August 21 of the same year inaugurated his second-term cabinet.

In the list released, the Presidency highlighted, “President Buhari established new Ministries, including Police Affairs and Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, exactly a year ago, August 21, 2019.”

But commenting on Friday evening on Channels Television’s programme, Politics Today, Osita Chidoka, an adviser to the PDP National Chairman, Uche Secondus, said the creation of new ministries should not be tagged as an achievement.

Chidoka, a former Minister of Aviation, said, “I was surprised that the government released a list of 35 achievements this year because a year ago or two years ago, they released 64 achievements. So, even by their quantum of achievements, the government has declined in productivity.

“But when you look at the quality of the achievements, the GDP of this country has fallen from N520bn in 2018 to N350bn… So, everybody is poorer in this government.

“On the economy, Nigeria’s debt has risen to about N36trn. It has grown three times to what it was in 2015. It has grown from about N12trn, meaning that 90 per cent of our revenue is actually going into debt servicing. So, I don’t know how that can be seen as an achievement.

“When you look at the debt profile, it is not as though we borrowed money to invest but we have borrowed money to do practically three things: they’ve used the borrowed money to sustain the naira at an unsustainable rate from N500 that it was during the 2015 fiasco to N360. They’ve also used this borrowing to finance fuel subsidy. The last one is the power sector subsidy. They are complaining that what supposed to have been done in the power sector hasn’t been done. So, the power sector is consuming a huge amount of foreign exchange that the government cannot sustain.

“Therefore, every Nigerian has paid for this strange 35 policies of which the number one on the agenda is the increase in the number of ministries. For a country that is currently (using) 90 per cent of its revenue to service its debt, building new ministries and bringing new people into work is certainly not what you should tag as an achievement.”