President Muhammadu Buhari will today meet with President Barack Obama at the White House, Washington, United States (U.S.).
The parley has been described as the mending of relations battered by the failure immediate past administration to decisively tackle Boko Haram uprising and corruption.
Buhari’s victory in the March 28 presidential election drew pledges from the U.S. government to retrieve stolen funds and stamp out insurgency through increased military aids.
Suicide bombings and village attacks blamed on Boko Haram extremists have killed hundreds of people at home and in neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon just in the past two weeks.
President Buhari’s May 29 inauguration was followed by a surge in attacks by the six-year-old uprising that has claimed more than 13,000 lives and driven some 1.5 million people from their homes.
The President also inherited a firestorm of other problems, including near-empty treasury, billions of arrears to workers on federal and state governments’ payroll and dwindling revenue following falling oil prices at the international market.
Today’s meeting with Obama is expected to focus on more military aid, recovering of stolen funds and reviving budding investments in Nigeria’s petroleum industry.
Ahead of the meeting, President Buhari has been cleaning the house he inherited from his predecessor Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.
Penultimate Monday, the President replaced all Service chiefs and laid off scores of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) members, who had been given lucrative positions on the boards of state owned agencies and parastatals.
Cleaning up the military may unblock sales of U.S. attack helicopters.
The U.S. law forbids the sale of certain arms to militaries accused of gross human rights abuses and Amnesty International (AI) has accused the military leadership of alleged complicity in the death of 8,000 detainees in the battle against Boko Haram.
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