New Telegraph

Buhari meets Lawan, Gbajabiamila over supplementary budget on security, others

President Muhammadu Buhari has met with the Senate President, Senator Ahmed Lawan and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, to deliberate on the presentation of a supplementary appropriation bill to the National Assembly to address issues of insecurity and procurement of coronavirus (COVID- 19) vaccines.

 

Briefing journalists after the closed-door meeting, Lawan said both the executive and the legislature believed that there should be supplementary budget to provide for funding of the COVID-19 vaccination in the country, as well as provide more resources and platforms to the nation’s security agencies.

 

He said: “Today, I’m sure in Nigeria, there are no more grave issues than COVID-19 and security situation in the country.

 

And I want to take this opportunity to say that the security situation is gradually improving. “And I’m sure that when we will have more resources to our security agencies we will see an even faster recovery of our situation.

 

“As for the COVID, I believe that our country, Nigeria , should have some resources for our scientists to collaborate with other scientists from across the globe, to also have our own vaccine. Because we can’t rely on what other countries are doing now.

 

“Every nation to itself, that’s what is happening. The US is not allowing vaccines to go out of us. EU is not allowing, AstraZeneca vaccine produced in UK to be sent out of EU. India is not allowing AstraZeneca vaccine they produce to be exported out. So, where do we go from here?

 

“We will have to fall back on our own capacities and abilities. And we have great scientists in this country. We have many Nigerians outside Nigeria, who are also helping developing the vaccines in other countries.

 

So why don’t you bring them home? Why don’t you put some resources so they will also produce ours locally here and take care of our population, and then later other African countries especially our neighbours.”

 

Asked about his opinion on the $100 million requested by a candidate for vaccine trial, Lawan argued that it made no sense to pay such amount of money to an individual when the country could boast of capable scientists home and abroad to put heads together in order to produce vaccines of international standard

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