Presidency blasts Moghalu for criticising Buhari’s absence at G7 summit

Nigeria’s Presidency Friday said former Central bank of Nigeria’s deputy governor Kingsley Moghalu misrepresented facts about President Muhammadu Buhari’s non-invitation to G7 summit held in France.

“Kingsley Moghalu is either ignorant or playing petty politics,” Buhari’s spokesman Garba Shehu said on Friday.

“The non-invitation of President Buhari to witness the G7 meeting this year is not a snub.”

Moghalu on Thursday said it is sad that the President of Africa’s supposedly largest economy wasn’t invited to the summit but his counterparts from Rwanda, President Paul Kagame, and South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, were invited.

“Our country should be at the table, not on the menu! Obasanjo, like him or not, was at the table,” Moghalu said.

Obasanjo was the Nigerian president between 1999 and 2007. He was invited to the summit three times.

The G-7 started inviting African countries after the creation of the African Segment in 2001. Nigeria was invited twice in President Buhari’s first four years.

Shehu, however, responded that the non-invitation of the president does not diminish the status of Nigeria as the biggest economy on the continent.

“It seems no one clarified to the one-time presidential candidate how the G7 secretariat works.”

“If they invited a country with an economy the size of Niger State, not Kano’s, not even Lagos’s does it call for Dr Moghalu’s lamentation?”

He said it is left to the organisers of the summit to invite whom they want. He noted that the president didn’t go to Europe before he signed an MOU of 50 Million Euro in support to the country’s devastated North East.

“The joke is not on President Buhari. The joke is on Moghalu for attempting to make ignorance fashionable.”