A collage photo of Bola Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar
By Akeem Atoyebi
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and the presidency, yesterday, engaged in war of words over the state of the nation, especially as the economy totters on the brinks.
Atiku, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) 2023 presidential candidate, who criticised President Bola Tinubu’s leadership, advising him to eat the humble pie and adopt some of the policies in his manifesto in order to turn around the economy for good.
But the presidency, in its response, said if Atiku had won the 2023 presidential election, which held March last year, Nigeria would have been worse under his watch.
In a long statement personally signed, Atiku said he had been inundated with questions as to what he would have done differently if he was at the helm of affairs of the country.
He stated, “I am not the president, Tinubu is. The focus should be on him and not on me or any other. I believe that such inquiries distract from the critical questions of what Tinubu needs to do to save Nigerians from the excruciating pains arising from his trial-and-error economic policies.
”However, I understand and appreciate the challenges faced by citizens in seeking alternatives to what is not working for them. I hope Tinubu and members of his administration are humble enough to borrow one or two things from our ideas in the interest of the Nigerian people.
“I would now go ahead and articulate some of our ideas that would have had the potential to transform our beloved country,” he said.
On subsidy removal, Atiku pointed out that he has always advocated for the removal of subsidy on petrol because its administration had been mildly put, opaque with so much scope for arbitrariness and corruption.
He insisted that mind boggling rent profit from oil subsidy accrued to the cabals in public institutions and the private sector.
”I would have prioritised the following: First, tackling corruption. Fighting corruption should have commenced with the repositioning of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), which is a huge beneficiary of the status quo.
“Its commitment to reform and capacity to implement and enforce reforms is suspect. The subsidy regime has provided an avenue for rent seeking, and the NNPC and its guardians will be threatened by reforms.”
The former vice president added, “Second, paying particular attention to Nigeria’s poor refining infrastructure. We are by far the most inefficient Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member country in terms of both the percentage of installed refining capacity that works and the percentage of crude refined.
“We would’ve commenced the privatisation of all state-owned refineries and ensure that Nigeria starts to refine at least 50 per cent of its current crude oil output. Nigeria should aspire to export 50 per cent of that capacity to ECOWAS member states.”
In a swift retort, the presidency, in a statement titled, “Our Initial Response to Alhaji Atiku Abubakar,” by the Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, maintained that if Atiku had won the presidential poll last year, Nigeria would have been worse for it.
It explained that Tinubu inherited a country with a myriad of grave challenges, adding that in the over one year of the Tinubu administration, it has succeeded in correcting past mistakes made by President Olusegun Obasanjo, under whom Atiku served as Vice President from 1999 to 2007.
The presidency also accused Atiku of supervising a suspicious privatisation programme as vice president, alleging that Atiku lost the 2023 presidential poll principally because he promised to sell NNPC and other assets to his friends.
The statement said, “We have just read a statement credited to former vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, in which he tried to discredit President Bola Tinubu’s economic reform programmes while pushing his untested agenda as a better alternative.
“First, Alhaji Atiku’s ideas, which lacked details, were rejected by Nigerians in the 2023 poll. If he had won the election, we believe he would have plunged Nigeria into a worse situation or run a regime of cronyism.
“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.”
The presidency added, “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.
“President 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.”
The statement also said, “No leader worth his name will allow these two economic disorders to persist without moving to end them surgically.
