The All Progressives Congress (APC) has tackled the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 general elections, Peter Obi, for scoring President Bola Tinubu low in implementation of economic policy reform.
According to a statement on Wednesday signed by the National Publicity Secretary of the party, Felix Morka, Obi had during an interview on Prime Time on Arise TV on Tuesday, accused President Tinubu of poor performance in implementing economic policy reform.
The statement reads, “To be honest, it was painful to watch Mr. Obi as he laboured in vain to cobble together any sensible critical economic argument in the face of a stark and undeniable record of progress of the administration’s economic reforms.
Even Mr. Obi’s trademark opportunistic sensationalisation of transient difficulties that Nigerians have endured in patriotic support of the president’s bold and transformative economic plan availed no respite, as he floundered on national television, framing himself as a portrait of frustration and political desperation.
“Mr. Obi’s favourite retort, “I would have done better as president”, must be a symptom of a protracted bout of election failure-induced hangover from which he has not awakened to the reality that he is not the president.
Like an unlicensed back seat driver that thinks himself to be a race car driver, Mr. Obi needs to tame his bloated and deluded imagination.
“Opposition politics is not about denying the administration’s many successes. It is about critiquing what may be wrong but affirming what is right. It is not about wholesale condemnation that is only intended to mislead and score cheap political gains.
The steady progress of the Tinubu-administration across sectors is undeniable and evident for all Nigerians to see.
“It is hysterical that Mr. Obi, who was governor of a failed and forgotten administration in Anambra State of only 21 local government areas, would so brazenly boast of his capacity to govern Africa’s largest democracy.
Obi bequeathed a sordid legacy of economic stagnation, infrastructural decay, ecological disaster, and religious polarisation.
“Both as former governor of Lagos State and now as president, Tinubu is a dogged achiever, bold and unwavering in tackling and transforming difficult challenges into opportunities.
As he did for Lagos, President Tinubu is now doing for Nigeria with the economy rebounding steadily, posting productivity-enhanced trade surpluses in successive quarters, with a 3.6 percent economic growth forecasted for the current fiscal year; with a fast expanding foreign reserve; with revamped and operational local refineries; with food inflation on the decline; with a successful harmonisation of multiple exchange rates that now supports increased foreign direct investments and flow of remittances into the economy, and with a reasonably stable forex market.
“The administration also has posted in its success column the cleared $7 billion forex backlog, and Ways and Means debt of over $30 billion; with reduced debt servicing ratio from 98 percent to about 64 percent; with increased oil production in excess of 1.8mbpd, surpassing the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quota of 1.5mbpd for the first time in many years; with a repositioned stock exchange market that is now one of the most profitable in the world; with a vastly expanding agricultural, mine and steel, manufacturing, creative and several other sub-sectors of the economy, in a push to increase the non-oil contribution to GDP; and with the Chatham House only recently adjudging the nation’s economy as the most competitive it has been in 25 years.”
