Nigeria at 54: Military rule slowed down Nigeria’s progress -Yuguda

The Bauchi State Governor, Isa Yuguda ‎ has said that Nigeria could have done better in its 54 years of independence if not for military interventions and some other challenges that bedevilled her.

Yuguda made this known to the State House correspondents after a closed door meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, saying that notwithstanding the interruptions,  the nation was on the right track as the stage had been set for the country’s development.

“We cannot discard some of the challenges we have had which have made the country to suffer a lot of problems which ordinarily would have made the country more developed.

“Politically, we have had a lot of military interventions in the last 54 years which had made it impossible to deepen our democracy but now we have 15 years of uninterrupted democracy and we are deepening democracy. Politically, you can see the effect of our journey towards being a democratic nation.

“For the other sectors, sadly we have also had some challenges. Economically, we have challenges when it comes to implementation of our development programmes and some of those interventions which made it impossible for us to implement development programmes.

“We certainly could have done better even when it comes to operating the structure that can fight corruption in the system, it is only as late as the year 2006, 2007 that some of these institutions that fight corruption were put in place. So even the infrastructure for fighting corruption has not been put in place for a very long time until only recently.

“You can see that some of the infrastructure that should be better managed that will lead us, improve from the agrarian status, the agricultural potentials of the country were destroyed at a point in time because so many river basins were all over the country but mismanagement of the part of the public service made it impossible for those infrastructure to survive, to drive the agricultural economy so that we would have been in a better state than we are today because all this issue of joblessness we are talking about today,” he said. The Bauchi governor however said Nigeria at 54 had witnessed a lot of transformation and development.

“In the 60′s, we have not more that three or four universities but today how many universities are we talking about? 50 years ago, 54 years ago, how many road networks do we have in Nigeria? We can now see road networks, airports have been developed

“We can say we are on the right track and we believe that the stage has been set for the country to be a developed country,” he stated.