Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has said that President Bola Tinubu’s poor response to Nigeria’s economic challenges was setting the stage for a prolonged and deeper domestic economic crisis.
Atiku in a statement issued Sunday said the performance of the economy has, in recent weeks and months, been a subject of intense discourse among Nigerian citizens at home and abroad.
He said: “Nigerians are gravely concerned, and rightly so, that Tinubu’s poor response to Nigeria’s economic challenges is setting the stage for a prolonged and deeper domestic economic crisis.”
Atiku, who was the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 elections noted that his economic policies, drawn from a so-called Renewed Hope Agenda, are ironically dashing hopes, creating pain, and causing despair.
He lamented that the private sector is shrinking by the day as small businesses are emasculated as multinational companies, confused and weary of the economy, leave Nigeria in droves.
Atiku added that the intense cost of living pressures has created more misery for the poor in towns and villages.
He added: “There is hunger in the land as basic commodities, including BREAD, are becoming out of reach of the average Nigerians.
“His 2024 budget is a business-as-usual exercise, bereft of concrete ideas and actions that would support Nigeria’s journey toward economic transformation. Consisting largely of wasteful expenditures to cater to a bloated federal government, Budget 2024 will not facilitate growth and is incapable of empowering our citizens to earn a living and live a decent life.”
Atiku stated that Tinubu has shown no capacity to deal with the adverse and disastrous impact on the people and on businesses, of the new subsidy regime, and the new foreign exchange policy, which provides for a free-floating exchange rate.
He said his initiatives are literally uninformed, arbitrary, and chaotic, while his palliatives are too mean, pitiable, and contemptuous of the poor.
Atiku said Tinubu seems truly lost, bewildered, and overwhelmed.
He stressed that to mask their failures, Tinubu and his political appointees are busy blaming his predecessor in office for bequeathing a ‘dead’ economy.