Yesterday, Waziri Atiku Abubakar, in a critique of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s leadership, made several statements that perhaps were not an accurate reflection of the situation we now find ourselves in as a country.
Firstly, I supported, campaigned for and believed in the candidacy of Waziri Atiku Abubakar. However, the election was not stolen from him or the Nigerian public by either the Independent National Electoral Commission or the All Progressives Congress.
It would have been hard for us in the Peoples Democratic Party to win the 2023 Presidential election.
And the reasons for my assertion are logical.
If, as a united political party, the PDP could not defeat the APC and President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019 despite our best efforts, how could we have vanquished them in 2023 when we were disunited?
We had 11,262,978 votes in 2019. By 2022, Peter Obi had left us with the 1,693,485 votes we got in the Southeast. Then the G-5 Governors, namely, Nyesom Wike (Rivers state), Seyi Makinde (Oyo state), Samuel Ortom (Benue state), Okezie Ikpeazu (Abia state) and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi (Enugu State), departed and ended whatever hopes we had of getting at least 25% of the votes cast in their states.
Then we lost the other strongman of Kano politics (Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso) with his two million votes. And the second strongman, then Governor Ganduje, was with Tinubu.
So, while Tinubu was adding, we were subtracting.
If you minus the Southeast votes, Kano votes, and Oyo, Benue and Rivers, you will see that it roughly equals the 6,984,520 votes polled by Waziri Atiku Abubakar in 2023.
We in the PDP were not rigged out, nor was the election stolen from us. Rather, we were defeated by the disunity in our party.
It was for the same reason we lost the 2015 election when the PDP split into PDP and n-PDP, with the n-PDP and its four Governors eventually merging with the APC along with Kwankwaso.
2023 was just a replay of 2015. History did not repeat itself. We rather repeated history.
On the economic front, I supported Waziri Atiku Abubakar because he promised to do three cardinal things to redirect Nigeria’s economy in the right direction. These are:
Fuel subsidy removal
Floating the Naira, and
Devolution of power
President Bola Tinubu is now doing all three of these. We in the PDP should be pleased.
Let me address some alternative policies that Waziri Atiku Abubakar proposed.
Waziri Abubakar said he would have taken a gradual approach and would not have been as drastic as President Tinubu had been.
Given the reality of what the Tinubu administration inherited from the Buhari regime, I do not know if that would have been possible.
Have we forgotten so soon that the Buhari administration illegally borrowed ₦50 trillion through ways and means and depleted our foreign reserves, leaving behind more debt than all past governments combined?
The Buhari regime claimed they left a foreign reserve of $37.08 billion, only for JP Morgan, our reserve bankers, to publish a letter stating that they lied and our reserves were actually just $3.7 billion. The fallout of this is that Buhari’s Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria panicked and was arrested as he tried to flee Nigeria.
Faced with these realities, how would any responsible government have carried on spending $1 billion monthly on fuel subsidy and another $1.5 billion monthly defending the Naira and a further $300 million monthly subsidising electricity while servicing a total debt of almost $100 billion racked up by the previous administration with 92% of our revenue as at the end of Buhari’s tenure? Please fact-check me.
This is even as the Buhari government had sold future contracts for Nigeria’s crude oil, meaning that almost nothing was coming into the treasury for the first six months of the Tinubu administration.
Let us be realistic.
On February 26, 2024, Waziri Atiku Abubakar said President Bola Tinubu should learn from the Argentine President, Javier Milei, and implement his reforms like Milei handled his.
Waziri had said:
“Both leaders inherited a disoriented economy, but both applied different measures for recovery. President Javier Milei of Argentina was sworn into office on 10 December 2023. He inherited a worse condition than Nigeria’s. But what he did to return his country to a place where investors are ‘starting to believe’ should serve as a lesson to Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu.”
Interestingly, on Friday, September 27, 2024, the world’s preeminent financial and economic medium, The Financial Times, in a headline ‘Argentina’s poverty rate soars above 50% under Javier Milei’ revealed that rather than praise, the Argentine leader is receiving knocks, as his reforms are not achieving the desired results.
Poverty in Argentina is at its worst rate ever at 57%, and, according to FT, “136,000 jobs have been wiped out since Milei took office.”
Additionally, according to the International Monetary Fund, Argentina is now officially in recession as its economy has contracted by 3.5% in the last quarter and inflation hit a world record of 236.7%.
In contrast, Nigeria under Tinubu has experienced two quarters of unprecedented trade surpluses, and at the end of August 2024 had a record breaking ₦14.6 trillion trade surplus and a GDP growth of almost 3%, as Nigeria now exports more than she imports. Inflation had been tamed and minimum wage has been increased.
Next month, for the first time since Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi abrogated true federalism with his Unification of Assets Decree Number 34 on May 24, 1966, Local Governments will receive their funding directly due to the Tinubu administration’s judicial victory at the Supreme Court on Thursday, July 11, 2024, granting autonomy to local governments.
Our foreign reserves hit a record of $40.2 billion because we no longer indulge in the politically popular but economically unreasonable act of defending the Naira with $1.5 billion each month.
Now, imagine if President Tinubu had taken that February 26, 2024 advice from Waziri Atiku Abubakar to copy what Milei did, where would Nigeria be?
That alone shows that President Tinubu’s judgment is much better than Waziri Atiku Abubakar is giving him credit for, and it should be Javier Milei who ought to learn from Nigeria’s Tinubu, not vice versa!
