President Muhammadu Buhari monday held the Peoples Democratic Party’s 16-year reign responsible for the nation’s prevailing economic woes and said the party failed to save for the rainy day.

“In the First Republic, more enduring infrastructure was built with meagre resources. But in the past 16 years, we made a lot of money without planning for the rainy day”, the President said at a reception for a delegation of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), led by its President, Dr. Bernard Aliyu, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

“We showed a lot of indiscipline in managing our economy, and that is why we are where we are today” President Buhari said firmly, promising, however, that his administration would do its best to turn things around.

The President’s views echoed in faraway Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, where Governor Abiola Ajimobi attributed the comatose state of the economy to the country’s failure to save for the rainy day during the oil boom.

President Buhari in his presentation to the ICAO delegation explained that the country witnessed a decline in the quality of infrastructure development in the last 16 years in spite of the boom in oil prices, adding that even the First Republic administration with its meagre resources achieved much more.

He regretted that the PDP governments failed to grow the economy with the all-time rise of crude oil sales that hovered around $100 per barrel. “We showed a lot of indiscipline in managing our economy, and that is why we are where we are today”.

President Buhari said Nigeria needed to grow beyond emphasizing its potential and assured Nigerians that his administration would do its best to develop the economy beyond rhetoric’s.

Said the President, “Nigeria needs to work on her potential, so that we don’t remain permanently at the level of potential. If Ethiopia is sustained largely by her airline industry, we have greater potential here. But we must move out, engage with the rest of the world, as we need to re-establish the integrity of this country. We need to rebuild this country again”.