‘Nigerians rejected you’: Presidency slams Atiku over alternative reforms

The Presidency has lashed out at the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Atiku Abubakar, over his alternative reforms list.

Atiku, a former vice president, had, in a statement on Sunday, November 3, 2024, disclosed how he would have handled reforms better as president.

Atiku, who lost to President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2023 election, berated the president for removing fuel subsidy, floating the exchange rate, and increasing the electricity tariff in the country.

Reacting via a statement on Sunday, the Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, said Atiku’s ideas lacked details, noting that the former vice president’s plans were rejected by Nigerians in the 2023 election.

Onanuga stated that Atiku would have plunged Nigeria into “a worse situation or run a regime of cronyism” if he had won the election.

Onanuga said: “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.

Fuel price hike: Atiku slams Tinubu, calls president ‘T-Pain’

“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.”

The Star