The All Progressives Congress (APC) on Thursday blamed the previous administrations for the problems in Nigeria saying they simply preferred to postpone the doomsday.
The party said while other Presidents who intervened in the fuel subsidy regime did so to save a bit of money to get their jobs done and not because they were interested in solving structural problems that beset the economy, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu intervened to save Nigeria from rip-off and scavengers.
The National Publicity Secretary of the APC, Felix Morka, said this during a press conference on the administration’s mid-term anniversary accomplishments held in Abuja.
He was responding to questions on when Nigeria would start benefiting from the policies of the government, especially now that the masses are crying.
Arise News reports that since 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo, late Umaru Musa Yar Adua, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari had ruled Nigeria before Tinubu’s election in 2023.
But while giving the midterm report of the APC, Morka exonerated Tinubu and blamed his predecessors.
He said, “I think it varies from one child to the other. Some kids are faster than the others. So they crawl quicker than some. But irrespective of the time they crawl, they crawl. Children crawl and children are meant to crawl before they walk.
“So, I don’t think it’s an assessment of whether a child who is crawling is doing well. A child who is crawling is doing exactly what a child is expected to do, to crawl before they walk. So if a child is crawling, actually, if that’s your child, I think you should encourage the child to crawl because it’s crawling that strengthens their legs and other parts of the body to withstand the rigour of walking.
“You don’t need to encourage them to crawl. But I’m not sure why you raised that as an analogy to the conversation we’re having. In two years of this administration, we made it clear that this President has enacted a vision and proclaimed a mission to tackle problems that were created generationally in our country. All of the difficulties we speak about today didn’t drop from the sky. They were long in coming.
“As I said, all the Presidents who came before this President preferred to simply postpone the doomsday because we didn’t just wake up in the last two years to realise that fuel subsidy was a destructive device in our country. We didn’t.
“We’ve always known that, and as a matter of fact, there’s no President who has come in the last 15, 20 years who didn’t, in fact, remove fuel subsidy. When you think back, fuel was not at the point that President Tinubu met it back in 1999.
“It wasn’t. The way they did it was far, far lower. It was cheaper to buy fuel in 1999 in terms of local economy than it was at the time that the hurricane hit in this country.
“So it means that other Presidents were in fact taking out subsidy, you know, gradually. But let me tell you the difference between this President and the rest of them.
Other Presidents who intervened in the fuel subsidy regime did so to save a bit of money and to free up some money to get their job done.
“They didn’t do it because they were interested in solving structural problems that beset our economy. They didn’t do that. They simply needed to.
“The difference between President Bola Tinubu and the rest of them was that this President, you know, once he was inaugurated, he took an oath and said, you know what, enough is enough. He knew, and we know, that doing what this President has done would likely make him unpopular in the beginning, which we are all witnesses.
“However, that calculation and the relevance, the significance of that to the electoral prospects of 2027 did not stop him because he decided to put the strategic best interest of our country over and above his own electoral calculation.
“So when the opposition simply bandy stories around, ‘Oh things have happened, rice has gone up’ and all that, the President is on the top, because he knew that was going to come. And he was willing to stake highly so our country can have that shot at not just recovery.
“I think that in the fullness of his term, even two years from now, many Nigerians, among most Nigerians, will agree that this man, indeed, as I have said and I’m saying again, is truly Nigeria’s President of progress.”
Friday Olokor
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