By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Nigerians have been warned to take with a pinch of salt claims that President Muhammadu Buhari will put out on May 29 to mark his five years in office that have produced nothing but poor leadership.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), from which the All Progressives Congress
(APC) took power in 2015, urged the public to ignore false performance claims
and empty promises on the celebration of his inauguration.
PDP National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, said Buhari should apologise for “the tragic failures of his administration for wrecking our once robust and cohesive nation, imposing hardship and creating acute despondency across the country in the last five years.”
Ologbondiyan stressed in a statement that Buhari should also address “the manifest manipulations, bloodletting, intimidation, coercions, abuse of power and human right violations” in the presidential election in 2019 in order to heal the national polity.
He counselled Buhari to stop denying that his administration and the APC have deserted, betrayed, and abandoned underprivileged Nigerians, particularly the youth, after deceiving them with false promises to grab power in 2015.
The PDP said Buhari should not allow his handlers to push him into sugarcoating the failures of the past one year that was characterised by corruption, insecurity, and economic hardship.
It noted that Buhari, “who had promised to lead from the front, recedes deeper into the luxury and safety” of the Villa.
It urged Buhari not to let advisers to further ridicule his office by making him read another windy speech laced with vacuous promises, doctored performance claims, and myriads of incorrect statistics at variance with reality.
Buhari “should know that he cannot use the COVID-19 pandemic as excuse for failure as his administration had since lost grip of the security and economic situation in our country even before the outbreak of the scourge.
“Nigerians hope that [he] would always recall that the PDP handed over a robust economy which was rated as one of the fastest growing in the world, only for him to bring our nation to its knees as the world’s poverty capital and a debtor country within a space of five years,” Ologbondiyan said.
“Buhari should use the occasion to reflect that his administration has ruined our productive sector with harsh policies leading to closure of businesses, dearth in foreign and domestic investments and acute unemployment, with over 40 million job losses.”
Ologbondiyan also urged him to contemplate on the alarm raised by Labour and Productivity Minister, Chris Ngige, that unemployment rate will hit 33.5 per cent this year.
Under Buhari’s watch, he added, the naira valued at N160 to a dollar under the PDP, is now N390; the price of fuel has risen from where the PDP left it at N87 per litre to N145 to N125, and Value Added Tax (VAT) from 5 per cent to 7.5 per cent.
He said Buhari should ponder the fact that whereas the PDP administration paid off foreign debts and grew the economy; his administration continues to accumulate debt and deplete foreign financial instruments.
In his view, it is appalling that in the past five years, the Buhari Presidency cannot point to any landmark development project it initiated and completed anywhere in the country.
“Instead, what we get is a chaotic federal executive that resorts to recycling of imaginary achievements and attempting to appropriate PDP’s in critical sectors of our economy.”
The PDP urged Buhari “to align with the expectations of Nigerians by apologising for his failures and getting more competent hands to manage the affairs of our nation in the remaining three years of his administration.”