President Muhammadu Buhari has hit back at the British Parliamentarian, Ms. Priti Patel, over her call on potential investors to be wary about investing in Nigeria. The president described the call as “a wicked proposition lacking in substance and devoid of merit in empirical evidence established by facts.”

The former Secretary of State for International Development in the United Kingdom (UK), Ms. Priti Patel, had expressed the view in a publication she made on Nov. 19, 2018, inCity A.M.

President Buhari in a statement by his Senior Special Adviser, Garba Shehu, said Patel’s position is unfounded.

The statement declared: “Her claim to the effect that despite the president’s public anti-corruption platform, Nigeria has not seen any reduction in corruption since Buhari took office, trumpeting a so-called Transparency International report is a false fabrication that cannot be supported by the facts on the ground,” he said.

“By the time President Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in and took office, the only amount in the anti-corruption recovery account over 16 years of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was only N2 billion. This account has succeeded in netting over N400 billion today, translating to 1, 360 percent increase. This cannot amount to anything in terms of progress.”

 “As for the specific case of the agreement in 2010, between the NNPC and the Process & Industrial Development Limited (P&ID) for a 20-year contract to create a new natural gas development refinery, which appears to be her main issue, a project that fell through after a past Nigerian government reneged on its contractual commitments, we do not wish to plead the government’s case in the press.”

“Suffice it to say that the government of Nigeria, in recognition of the sanctity of the judiciary, has submitted to the jurisdiction of a court in the United States to determine the issues in dispute. What we can only say at this point is that Nigerians need to pity their own country for the way things were done in the past.”