Tinubu Vs Atiku: Nigerians Rejected You Because You Promised To Sell Refineries To Friends

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has chided Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president over his comment on his administration’s reforms in the oil and gas sector.

The president said the 2023 Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, is only trying to discredit his policies because he did not win last year’s election.

Abubakar has been an ardent critic of the president after Tinubu defeated him, in the keenly contested election last year.

The former vice president recently slammed President Tinubu for his hastily removing of fuel subsidy and and floating the naira without wide consultations.

The magazine reported that the removal removal has brought untold hardship to not a few Nigerians, who are calling for its reversal.

According to Atiku, his approach to the fuel and Naira subsidy removal would have been different if he had won the election, becoming the commander-in-chief.

He said the dual removal of petrol and  Naira subsidies should have been in ‘phases’, in a statement she shared on his verified X handle on Sunday.

Reacting, the Presidency in a statement by Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu’s Spokesman said the former number two citizens lacked the knowledge on what is going on in the country, particularly in the oil and gas sector.

Tinubu said Abubakar’s approach on how to tackle the country’s economic challenges is very opaque, the reason why Nigerians rejected him at the polls.

Apart from lacking ideas on how to run the economy, Tinubu said Abubakar was prepared to sell the country’s refineries to his friend and cronies,stressing that the PDP candidate mismanaged the country’s economy while he served as vice president under President Olusegun Obasanjo.

“Talk is cheap,” Tinubu slammed Abubakar, saying his government’s policies are already yielding results.

Below Presidency Full statement:

Tinubu defeated the PDP candidate who came second in the presidential election last year.

We have just read a statement credited to former vice president Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, in which he tried to discredit  President Bola Tinubu’s economic reform programmes while pushing his untested agenda as a better alternative.

First, Alhaji Atiku’s ideas, which lacked details,  were rejected by Nigerians in the 2023 poll.

If he had won the election, we believe he would have plunged Nigeria into a worse situation or run a regime of cronyism.

Abubakar lost the election partly because he vowed to sell the NNPC and other assets to his friends.  Nigerians have not forgotten this, nor would they be comforted by Atiku’s antecedents when he ran the economy in the first term of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government between 1999 and 2003.

As vice president, Atiku supervised a questionable privatisation programme. He and his boss demonstrated a lack of faith in our educational system, and both went to establish their universities while they allowed ours to flounder.

Talk is cheap. It is easy to pontificate and deride a rival’s programmes even when there are irrefutable indices that the economic reforms yield positives despite the temporary difficulties.

Despite the futile attempt to hoodwink Nigerians again in his statement, it is gratifying that the former Vice President could not repudiate the economic reforms pursued by the Tinubu administration because they are the right things to do.

His advocacy for a gradualist approach only showed that he was not in tune with the enormity of problems inherited by President Tinubu.

It is so easy to paint a flowery to-do list. It is expected of an election loser.

President Tinubu met a country facing several grave challenges. Fuel subsidies were siphoning away enormous resources we could ill afford, and there was criminal arbitrage in the forex market.

No leader worth his name will allow these two economic disorders to persist without moving to end them surgically.

While advocating for gradual reforms may sound appealing, Tinubu took measures that should have been taken decades ago by Alhaji Abubakar and his boss when they had the opportunity.

Alhaji Abubakar calls for empathy and a human face to reforms. We have no problem with this as it resonates well with our administration’s focus. President Tinubu has consistently emphasised the need for compassion and protection of the most vulnerable.

The administration has prioritised social safety nets and targeted support for those affected by recent economic transitions.