Founding National Secretary of Alliance for Democracy (AD), Professor Udenta O. Udenta, has said that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has shown that he is not a listening president as he has kept implementing various policies in the country that “are not working and they will never work”, instead of listening to the demands of Nigerians.
Udenta said this in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Thursday while discussing the state of Nigeria’s economic hardship, where he also said that President Tinubu has lost the political plot on how to govern Nigeria, and that if one loses the political plot, it is not possible for him to get the economic plot on how to properly govern Nigeria and ease the hardship in the country.
The professor criticised Tinubu’s administration for implementing policies that he argues are ineffective and out of touch with the needs of the people as he said, “The president has tried to throw in as many policies as possible into the system, these policies are not working and they will never work. The first thing is that if you do not want to listen to people, and expand the horizon of presidential governance and then service delivery, there is nothing you will touch that is going to be productive and valuable to the people.”
“You can only tell a man who wants to listen to you. In the past 15 months, it is clear to everybody who cares to understand that this president and his team are listening to nobody but to themselves. And when you listen to yourself, you belong to what is called a mutual admiration club. You think that what you’re doing is so fantastic, but the rest of the world- you’re completely disconnected, cut loose from them and their reality. So, I don’t know what is going to happen for him to listen,” he added.
Udenta, highlighting the challenges facing Nigeria, stated, “President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has lost the political state- I’ve said it repeatedly, I’ve put out a piece weeks and weeks ago. If you find generals who are today standing erect and saying there is a problem in the country, these are former presidents who belong to the council of state that the other day gave you some sort of breathing space coming out to say that the country is prostrate. You must therefore understand that if you don’t get the political order, the organised political system right, you can never get the economic system right.”
Udenta then said that while some believe that policy review works to help a nation, his understanding is that “if you don’t get the political plot, you will never get the economic plot.”
Drawing from former Chief of Defence Staff General Abdulsalami Abubakar earlier speech urging Nigerian leaders to end insecurity and economic hardship in Nigeria, Udenta said, “If you want to solve the problem as quickly as possible, the first thing you have to do, like General Abdulsalami Abubakar pointed out, is how do you as a government- as the president and as a team- find how using the ministries and agencies and institutions that are available to you, in which you are in charge, where is it hurting the people most? Taxation- people believe that even fuel subsidy removal is taxation, people believe that there’s been many taxations in electronic modes of transmitting money and so on, people believe that the taxation of the power sector is massive, people believe that VAT should even be brought down. So, when the people are overtaxed, the little they earn will not even be enough for them to survive by the end of the day. So, the multiple taxation frontiers must be closed down and managed in such a way that the people have breathing space, so that whatever little money may have may be useful to them.
“Secondly is fuel supply and the pricing itself. The unfortunate thing is that having pressed labour to such a degree that the President of Labour is even being accused of treason and treasonable felony, they’re now issuing a statement about the latest increase in the pricing of petroleum products and saying the president betrayed labour. But beyond that, nothing has happened. He needs to increase the last increase, there is no justification for it. If we do that, probably the price of transportation may come down, the price of foodstuff may come down a little bit, the list can go on and on.”
He went on to criticise the Tinubu administration’s reliance on palliatives, arguing that they have not proven effective, reiterating what General Abdulsalami Abubakar had earlier said in his speech.
He said, “Off with palliatives, it will not work. I agree with General Abdulsalami Abubakar that palliatives will not work. It has never worked anywhere- it didn’t work for the eight years of the Buhari regime, it will not work now, and it is not working.”
Udenta then said, “The Buhari 8 years intensified national contradictions, broke the spirit of the people, allowed terrorism, banditry, cultism, and all manners of insufferable criminality to pervade and overwhelm the people. The Bola Tinubu presidency seems to have lost its way completely, bemused as it is at the land laid prostate and hurting. The military therefore, the top generals are saying- Hello, we are lions maybe in our winter, but we have a voice, a stake as patriots that this country shouldn’t go under. If the presidency is imploding, the rest of the country shouldn’t implode with it. So, it is time for the country and the leader of this nation now to take a stock. The past one and a half years have come down unfairly and unjustly for the people. There is so much they have taken and so little left for them to take.
“It is therefore crucial that rhetoric will not do the job for this government. What will do the job will be to roll in their sleeves if there’s still anything left for them to roll. What is left for this president and his team is to call a spade a spade and say, you have governed like I predicted from the margins and periphery of the political state, therefore, you have lost the political plot.”
Ozioma Samuel-Ugwuezi
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