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Reno Omokri
@renoomokri
Why Waziri Atiku Abubakar Should Cut President Bola Tinubu Some Slack
I supported the candidacy of Waziri Atiku Abubakar. However, the election was not stolen from him or the Nigerian public.
It would have been hard for us in the Peoples Democratic Party to win the 2023 Presidential election.
If, as a united political party, the PDP could not defeat the APC in 2019, 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 departed and ended whatever hopes we had of getting 25% in their states.
Then we lost Kwankwaso with his two million votes.
If you minus Southeast, Kano, and Oyo, Benue and Rivers votes, you will see that it roughly equals the 6,984,520 votes polled by Waziri Atiku Abubakar in 2023.
We were defeated by the disunity in our party.
Let me now address some alternative policies Waziri Atiku proposed.
Waziri 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, I do not know if that would have been possible.
Have we forgotten 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 say they lied and our reserves were just $3.7 billion. The fallout of this is that Buhari's CBN Governor panicked and was arrested as he tried to flee Nigeria.
Faced with these realities, how would any responsible government carry on spending $1 billion monthly on fuel subsidy, $1.5 billion monthly defending the Naira and a further $300 million monthly subsidising electricity while servicing a total debt of almost $100 billion with 92% of our revenue as at the end of Buhari's tenure?
On February 26, 2024, Waziri said:
"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 Financial Times, in a headline 'Argentina’s poverty rate soars above 50% under Javier Milei' revealed that rather than praise, the Argentine leader reforms have failed.
Poverty in Argentina is at its worst rate ever at 57%, and "136,000 jobs have been wiped out since Milei took office."
Additionally, according to the IMF, 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 experienced two quarters of unprecedented trade surpluses, and at the end of August 2024 had a ₦14.6 trillion trade surplus and a GDP growth of almost 3%. Inflation had been tamed and minimum wage increased.
Next month, for the first time since 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!
11:00 AM · Nov 5, 2024
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132.8K
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