Dogara denies attacking Buhari over budget comments

Nigeria’s Speaker of House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara has denied issuing a statement in which he allegedly attack the country’s president Muhammadu Buhari.

Dogara called the report credited to him as responding to Buhari’s statement during a media chat on Monday by some local news outlets as a “fake” report.

“It should be totally disregarded,” Dogara’s spokesperson Turaki Hassan said in statement on Tuesday night.

Buhari talked down of the 8th national assembly leaders during a special interview with NTA.

The president specifically “rated” Dogara and senate president Bukola Saraki “low in patriotism” and also accused them of holding “the country at ransom for seven months” for not passing the 2018 budget in due time.

“Unfortunately, they were not hurting me; they were hurting the country.  So, really, in terms of patriotism, I think I rated them very low indeed,” Buhari said.

In reaction to this, some local media outlets, reported that Dogara said Buhari is blaming others in an attempt to exonerate himself from any blame or failure of the executive.

The statement also quoted Dogara as claiming that Buhari and his cabinet were responsible for budget delays.

“President Buhari a few days ago in his usual characteristics of self-righteousness and buck-passing, blamed tardiness in the passage of budgets by the National Assembly for the delay in completion of projects across the country,” a statement purportedly credited to Dogara said.

Dogara’s party, People’s Democratic Party, described the president’s interview on Tuesday as “a resort to blame game and false performance claims to cover up his administration’s failures and incompetence.”

Kola Ologbondiyan, PDP’s spokesman in a statement said the party also indicted Buhari for failing to use his orchestrated interview to give account of ‘the trillions stolen under his watch in the last four years.’

“It is unfortunate that instead of accepting responsibility for the failures of his administration, Mr. President is looking for scapegoats where there are none,” Ologbondiyan said.