He gave the advice while receiving residents of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) led by the Minister of Federal Capital Territory, Mohammed Bello, who paid him a Sallah homage at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
The President also called for all hands to be on deck in order to salvage the nation.
He said: “Please in your constituencies emphasized what I said about 30 years ago, we don’t have another country except Nigeria. We may as well remain here and salvage it together, there is nothing else we can do.
“Even those that had gone out are now trying to come back because they are not wanted out there. I wish all the resources they had, they had deployed it here and it would have been much better.
“So thank you very much and please try to persuade your constituencies to work much harder away from individualism and sectionalism.”
He noted that Nigeria is abundantly blessed with human and natural resources, but other resources were neglected during the oil boom.
The President added: “This country is blessed on human and material resources. Here I have to digress and wish my former Minister of Mines and Steel, Fayemi, well. He has been a very hardworking minister, because the ministry he was leading was neglected with the overbearing economic relevance of oil.
“But from the days of mining of tin, columbite, coal and so on, you know this country is blessed. Throughout the country, we have solid minerals and I am hoping that Fayemi will succeed to lead his state again. I believe he is a very hardworking person, very patriotic but Nigerian politics is virtually unpredictable.
“We are going to work very hard to fill his space in the executive council so that we keep on exploiting more and more of our solid minerals and less politicizing of our petroleum resources.”
