While awaiting Mr. Ologbondiyan and PDP leaders’ account of ‘significant milestones’, as well as Prof. Jega’s evidence that both PDP and APC have failed Nigerians, as members of APC, we should be able to engage the debate by providing supporting evidence highlighting the contrasting scorecards of APC government in the last six years. In doing so, it will be necessary to acknowledge challenges. Unlike PDP leaders, APC leaders are not in denial of the existence of challenges. Despite the challenges, however, APC Federal Government under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari is making efforts to move the country forward. To confirm that, unlike the PDP, APC led government is not a failure, three important achievements, in the areas of social investment, infrastructure and agriculture will be emphasised. Assessment of challenges of insecurity and how APC is handling it different will also be presented as part of the supporting evidence of APC’s contrasting scorecard.

Social Investment Programme: Since emerging as the governing party in 2015, APC Federal Government has been implementing National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), which is far more than what any government in the past has done. Now elevated to a ministerial status, which is the initiative of President Buhari, it is founded on four pillars of N-Power, Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), Home Grown School Feeding and Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP). With the goal of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty, millions of poor Nigerians are benefiting from these initiatives. For instance, GEEP has disbursed N36.9 billion in interest-free loans of between N50,000 to N350,000 to more than 2.3 million Nigerians. Under the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, 9.9 million primary 1 – 3 pupils in 54,952 public primary schools in 35 states have benefited. Additional 107,000 cooks have been engaged. In the case of Conditional Cash Transfer, more than three million poor and vulnerable households have been registered on the National Social Register, out of which more than one million families are currently being paid N5,000 monthly.

Infrastructure: When President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration assumed office in 2015, the total budget for federal roads by the outgoing PDP government of former President Goodluck Jonathan was 18 billion Naira, which was only about 25% of the Lagos State roads budget for that year. The persistent skeletal funding translated to abandoned or slow-moving road projects across the country. APC administration’s first priorities were to increase the amount of funding available for road projects, while also ensuring the resumption of work on abandoned projects. In 2016, the roads budget went up to 260 billion Naira, for which about 200 billion Naira was released.

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Significantly, more resources were devoted to construction of road and transport infrastructure than any other administration since 1999, and the results are roads, bridges, highways, rail lines and stations, and air and seaport upgrades. Work has since resumed on several stalled, abandoned or solution-defying road projects that were inherited, like the Loko-Oweto Bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Sagamu-Benin Expressway, the Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway, Onitsha-Enugu Expressway, Kano-Maiduguri Expressway, Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano Expressway, Obajana-Kabba Road, Ilorin-Jebba Road, Apapa-Oshodi-Oworonshoki Road, and several others are in progress, with some already close to completion.

A brand new bridge in Ikom, Cross River State, has just been completed, to replace a dilapidated steel truss bridge originally built five decades ago, as was a new border bridge linking Nigeria and Cameroon, in the spirit of regional integration. Construction work on the Second Niger Bridge, a contract awarded multiple times between 2002 and 2015 but constantly stalled for lack of funding, finally kicked off in 2018, with guaranteed funding for the first time in the history of the project. In 2017, construction finally commenced on the Bodo-Bonny Bridges and Road (linking Bonny Island to the Rivers Mainland), a project first mooted decades ago, and awarded a number of times without success prior to the Buhari APC led administration. Currently, according to the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing, there are around 900 active road contracts covering the construction, reconstruction or rehabilitation of more than 13,000km of federal roads and highways across the country, out of a total of 35,000km of federal roads in existence.

Agriculture: Some of the specific initiatives of the APC-led government of President Buhari in the agricultural sector include National Food Security Council (NFSC), Agriculture for Food and Jobs Plan (AFJP), National Livestock Transformation Plan, the Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP), the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative (PFI), and creation of an enabling environment. Specifically the ABP, for instance, implemented by the Central Bank of Nigeria, since 2015, provided more than 300 billion Naira to more than 3.1 million smallholder farmers of 21 different commodities (including Rice, Wheat, Maize, Cotton, Cassava, Poultry, Soy Beans, Groundnut, Fish), across Nigeria, successfully cultivating over 3.8 million hectares of farmland.

The PFI has produced and delivered to the Nigerian market over 30 million 50kg bags equivalent of fertilizer, at reduced prices; and resulted in the revival or construction of no fewer than 40 moribund fertilizer blending plants across the country. That Nigeria today has 44 functioning blending plants, with more on the way, is solely due to the success of the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative (PFI). The plants include the following:

• In 2017, the multinational group Olam invested $150 million in an integrated animal feed mill, poultry breeding farms and hatchery in Kaduna State, as well as an integrated poultry and fish feed mill in Kwara State.
• In Anambra State, the Coscharis Group began the cultivation of rice in 2016 on a 2,500 hectare farm, and soon after expanded into milling with the commissioning of a 40,000 MT modular rice mill in 2019.
• In Niger State, the BUA Group is currently completing a $300 million integrated facility comprising a sugar mill, ethanol plant, sugar refinery and power plant and a 20,000-hectare farm.
• In Kebbi State, GB Foods has invested 20 billion Naira in a tomato processing factory supplied by what is said to be the single largest tomato farm in the country. Future phases of the investment will make it the largest processing facility for fresh tomatoes in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The same GB Foods in July 2020 opened its N5.5 billion mayonnaise production facility in Ogun State, which will be supplied with input from the company’s new farms in Kebbi State.
• In Lagos, Ariel Foods FZE recently constructed and completed the biggest Ready-To-Use Therapeutic Foods (RUTF) production facility in Africa.
• In Nasarawa State, the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) recently completed work on the first phase of a multi-million-dollar animal feed processing facility and a backward-integrated 3000-hectare maize and soya beans farm, in a co-investment partnership with a South African investment group.
• In 2021, the Dangote Group commissioned its $2 billion fertilizer plant with an annual capacity of 3 million metric tonnes, making it the largest fertilizer plant in West Africa. In June 2021, the plant began delivering an average of 120 trucks of Urea per week to the Nigerian market, and is also set to target the export market across West Africa and beyond.
• State governments are also actively keying into the President’s agriculture vision. In 2018, Cross River commissioned a three billion Naira hybrid rice seedlings factory to supply rice seedlings to farmers and governments across the country.
• Lagos State is completing the 32 metric tonne per hour Imota Rice Mill, which, when functional, will be one of the largest rice processing facilities in sub-Saharan Africa. The Imota Rice Mill will produce 2.4 million bags of 50kg per annum, and create an estimated 250,000 direct and indirect jobs, and will plug Lagos State firmly into the national rice value chain.
• Ekiti State is reviving its Ikun Dairy Farm in a successful partnership with Promasidor, with a production target of 10,000 liters of milk daily.
• In Ondo State, the 9 billion Naira Sunshine Chocolate Factory – a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) involving the state government – was completed and commissioned in 2020 to take advantage of the state’s leading position in the cultivation of cocoa.

Apart from these three sectors, there are other initiatives in other sectors. The achievements cited in these three sectors are just to substantiate the point that based on records of performance in government, APC can’t be in the same category with PDP. Anybody arguing that these achievements represent failure will need to substantiate with convincing evidence how their impact on the lives of Nigerians translate to negative outcomes.

• Salihu Moh. Lukman is of the Progressive Governors Forum, Abuja.