Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, on Monday, expressed disappointment with the President Bola Tinubu-led administration.
He noted that over two years after taking the reins of governance, there’s nothing indicating that President Bola Tinubu can tackle the prevailing hunger and poverty in the country.
Atiku, who described the hunger in the country as unacceptable, especially as it affects the underprivileged poor and down-trodden, said “most violent socio-political eruptions and revolutions all over the world had often been powered by pervasive hunger and unbearable material conditions – especially the paradox of squalor amidst plenty in our land.”
The foremost opposition leader in a statement through his Spokesman, Mr Paul Ibe, said whereas the primary objective of any government is the security and welfare of its citizens, the masses of Nigerians are progressively wallowing in misery and poverty under the watch of the President Tinubu-led All Progressives Congress administration.
Atiku noted that the current situation does not give cause for cheers as it engenders an increasingly progressive propensity for criminalities in form of high-wire fraud, terrorism, kidnapping, cultism, drug addiction and ritual sacrifice, among others.
He counselled that the “current unacceptable situation offers an opportunity for reflection” and cited the French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Arab Spring in which a young man caught in the maelstrom of unbearable frustration set himself ablaze in a development which occasioned violent socio-political eruptions starting out from Tunisia to engulf the Middle-East and North Africa.
Atiku said, “Back home here in Nigeria, it may not be out of place to argue that even the “ENDSARS” protest was fuelled by the traumatising frustration of hunger and insensitivity on the part of the government.
“Whatever reform the Tinubu government might claim to be undertaking, the point remains that food insecurity is a daily occurrence nationwide. There is no government worth its salt that does not place priority on the welfare and security of the people.”
He further stated that since reforms are made for citizens and not the other way round, the reforms of this administration should have a human face.
“Whether the present powers accept it or not, the reality of our existence is that the poor are increasingly dying of hunger while the majority of the living poor exists at the mercy of the ill-advised policies of this government,” Atiku said.
