The Presidency through the Special Adviser to the President on information and strategy, Bayo Onah has told former Vice President of Nigeria and Candidate of Peoples Democratic Party ( PDP) in the last Presidential election. Atiku Abubakar that he would have plunged the country into a worse situation if he had emerged as the winner of the election .
Onanuga while reacting to Atiku’s claim that his reforms would have “protected our fragile economy against a much deeper crisis by preventing business collapse” said if he ( Atiku )had won the election, he would have plunged Nigeria into a worse situation or run a regime of cronyism
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Abubakar lost the election partly because he vowed to sell the NNPC and other assets to his friends. Nigerians have not forgotten this, nor would they be comforted by Atiku’s antecedents when he ran the economy in the first term of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government between 1999 and 2003.
“As vice president, Atiku supervised a questionable privatisation programme. He and his boss demonstrated a lack of faith in our educational system, and both went to establish their universities while they allowed ours to flounder.
“Talk is cheap. It is easy to pontificate and deride a rival’s programmes even when there are irrefutable indices that the economic reforms yield positives despite the temporary difficulties.
“Despite the futile attempt to hoodwink Nigerians again in his statement, it is gratifying that the former Vice President could not repudiate the economic reforms pursued by the Tinubu administration because they are the right things to do.
“His advocacy for a gradualist approach only showed that he was not in tune with the enormity of problems inherited by President Tinubu.
“It is so easy to paint a flowery to-do list. It is expected of an election loser.”
Onanuga added that Prsident Tinubu met a country facing several grave challenges.
“Fuel subsidies were siphoning away enormous resources we could ill afford, and there was criminal arbitrage in the forex market.
“No leader worth his name will allow these two economic disorders to persist without moving to end them surgically.
“While advocating for gradual reforms may sound appealing, Tinubu took measures that should have been taken decades ago by Alhaji Abubakar and his boss when they had the opportunity.”
