‘One Term Not Enough to Fix Nigeria’ – Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari has said it will require more than one term in office to fix Nigeria and deliver the promised change.

While urging Nigerians to re-elect him for another term of four years, the President gave the assurance that the fruits of the efforts he had made in fixing the country in the last three and a half years would soon begin to manifest.

He maintained that the change promised by his government was not an event but a process and it would, therefore, require time to deliver.

The President said this on Monday in Lagos while delivering the 75th anniversary business lecture of the Island Club.

The lecture titled, “Nation building and institutional development, lessons for Nigeria from the Island Club at 75,” was delivered on behalf of Buhari by the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, Punch writes.

Buhari, who is the grand patron of the club, recalled that unlike now, there was a time when the club held its major events in the open air because it had no hall and could not afford one then.

“It took more than one term and one election cycle of the Chairman of Island Club to build this hall just as it will require more than one election cycle to build the nation and deliver change,” the President said.

He argued that the fact that the Island Club had existed for 75 years had put a lie to the claim that there were no institutions in the country.

This, he said, was another lesson that the nation had to learn from the club’s 75th anniversary, stressing that the fact that people expected more from the existing institutions did not mean that the institutions did not exist.

Buhari said he had put the country on the path of food security by banning the importation of rice despite opposition by vested interests, who frustrated earlier government food security policies such as Operation Feed the Nation and the Green Revolution.

He added that under his watch the manufacturing sector had made progress, while also arguing that the reforms in the power sector had led to improved power supply, which had rubbed off on small-scale businesses.