President: I have done enough to spend rest of my time cutting ribbons

President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih said Monday that given the volume of the projects his administration has conducted, he would have to spend the reminder of his time in office cutting ribbons.

He made the remark during a campaign rally in AA. Thoddoo.

“If I were to cut ribbons, I would have to spend the remaining days of this term cutting ribbons. We have completed that many projects,” he said.

President Solih said his administration would not get anything else done if they were to cut ribbons, and that talking about the harbors the administration is developing alone would take at least half an hour.

“By July/August of this year, the projects I mentioned will be complete. If we were to spend our time doing this, we wouldn’t get anything else done,” he said.

President Solih said that his administration had continued conducting development projects, even during the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic. He said that Maldives would have gone bankrupt like its neighbor Sri Lanka if it hadn’t.

President Solih’s comments follow criticism from his rival for MDP’s presidential ticket, MDP’s leader and Parliament speaker Mohamed Nasheed, who accused his administration of beginning projects but never finishing them.

Statistics released by the President’s Office show the current administration has 17 projects in Thoddoo alone; four of the projects are complete, six are ongoing, two are in pre-tendering stage, two are in tendering stage, two are in the planning phase, and one has been contracted.

The rift within MDP grows as the two leaders compete for the party’s ticket. The election, in which 57,255 MDP members are eligible to vote, will take place on January 28.