The Presidency has mocked ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar over his comments on the reform policies of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, saying Nigerians rejected him even with his alternative reforms, News About Nigeria reports.
Atiku, who was the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 election, had on Sunday suggested how he would have carried out reforms in the foreign exchange market and the removal of fuel subsidy if he were the president.
Reacting to this, the Presidency faulted his alternative reforms, stating that after presenting these reform plans to Nigerians he was still rejected as he couldn’t win the 2023 general elections.
The Presidency also described his alternative reforms as a flowery to-do list, adding that it is not realistic and lacks details.
The statement reads in part, “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,” presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga said in a statement on his X handle.
“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.
“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.
“No leader worth his name will allow these two economic disorders to persist without moving to end them surgically.”
