Fashola denies promising APC will fix power in six months

Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola has denied promising that the All Progressives Congress (APC) will fix power supply issues in six months.

Several reports claimed that the Minister of Works and Housing promised in the lead-up to the 2015 election that if voted in, the APC would solve Nigeria’s power challenge. The reports went further to claim that Fashola urged Nigerians to “stone” him if the promise was not kept.

But the minister has denied making such a statement, describing it as a “lie that I allowed”.

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“One of the things that were said about me was that I said we would electrify Nigeria in six months,” Fashola said during a Channels Television’s election show The 2023 Verdict on Monday.

“It was a lie that I allowed to run until the day I asked my media men to play the tape back and since then that lie has gone.”

The minister said he could not have made the comment since the tone did not align with his personality.

“I know that in the way I speak, I don’t use words like stone. I am not even a violent person. Stone is violence. I don’t use those kinds of words. They are not part of my vocabulary,” he added.

Fashola also decried the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) naira swap policy, saying public officeholders should review their plans if they are not producing the right results.

“I empathise with those challenges but some of them are the result of policy and it is the responsibility of public servants, especially those responsible for those policies to look back and say, ‘Did we intend to cause this pain?’

“And if the policy is not working, perhaps you have to readjust and also ask yourself whether you thought this through. As a public officer, before and now, I have had cause to reverse myself, when I saw that my policies were causing unintended results.

“So, I have no responsibility in those two areas and therefore I cannot speak to the details of the facts that are available to the policymakers but the important thing is that those policies are not yet delivering the results and are delivering a lot of inconvenience for [people],” he said.