By Lateef Ibrahim, Abuja
Leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, Prince Adewole Adebayo has advised President Bola Tinubu to be more concerned about the people’s anger against his government than
the coalition of opposition political parties against him ahead of the 2027 general election.
Adebayo noted that the President is politically savvy enough to know that the coalition is not his problem.
According to the SDP Leader, “He (Tinubu) knows the people in the coalition. They are all friends. There’s hardly anybody in the coalition who you cannot find 10,000 pictures of them with the president. They are all together.
“The real thing that the president should worry about is the resentment of the people and the problems that people are facing in reality. It is not the coalition that has been putting pictures and billboards all over,” he said.
Adebayo blamed President Bola Tinubu for focusing on 2027, abandoning governance and failure to give good governance to Nigeria.
He noted that what Nigerians have under Tinubu is not administration but presidency.
His words: “If we are to be fair to the Tinubu government, we should talk about the Tinubu presidency, not the Tinubu administration, because there’s no administration going on.
“What you have is an imperial majesty in the presidency. Their eyes are not to the ground. Do not call them an administration. Just call them the presidency, because they took a note of office that you are not the president, and they created a group who are in the state house.
“Beyond that, they have not been able to create an administration.”
The ertswhile presidential candidate of the SDP also noted the President Tinubu and his team of economic experts have not been able to give Nigerians a workable budget for two years running.
He said the president had presented two annual budgets to Nigerians but lamented that the last one was far worse than the first one.
Neither of the two budgets, according to him, has been able to get a grip of anything.
His words, “They have not been able to write a single good budget. They are reaching two budgets now and the only difference is that the one that came after is worse than the one before.
‘They are not able to get a grip of anything. They are not doing well with employment. They need to know that the tool for dealing with poverty is employment,” he stated.
Adebayo equally picked holes in the much celebrated students’ loan programme, stressing that all that the Tinubu administration needed to have done to make education accessible to an average Nigerian without seeking for loan was to bring the cost of education down.
In his words, “I don’t agree with them on their student loan, because all you need to do is bring the cost of education down, and an average person will be able to go to school without needing a loan.
“But even with the loan, they are not able to administer it properly. The Tinubu Presidency is not a government. It may be a political movement that has now found itself in power. They can now decide to continue to strengthen themselves politically by capturing more governors, more senators and more political parties to join them, but they are not just in government.
“However, they can also decide to say, let’s sit down; let us stop this and administer the economy,” he said.
Adebayo stressed that an administration is only political to the extent of being politically sensitive while making decisions.
He lamented that the Tinubu administration, so far, has not even shown any signal that it is prepared to address the people’s problems.
His words: “An administration is not focused on just politics; it’s not a campaign organization rolling into the statehouse. It is now a government for the people. So they will administer water, air quality, everything that’s within the federal mandate. And they will give leadership to the rest of the economy.
” I know you haven’t seen that. I haven’t seen that. President Tinubu has not even signaled that and very few in his presidency are signaling that”.
He noted that Tinubu and members of his team were more interested in enlarging their political coast and building more business empires than addressing the needs of the people they govern.
He said, “What you see dominating them and the focus of their existence is more power in enlarging their political coasts, enlarging business empires that support that political empire, and continuing to play chess while the house is burning. They play political chess while the entire warehouse is burning.
“It is an election snatching machine that is getting stronger. And I’m not jealous of the fact that they’re getting stronger. I’m worried about the fact that they are using government time, government resources to do so,” he stated.
However, he commended President Tinubu for finding time to visit Katsina State to meet with soldiers fighting against insurgency and boost their morale instead of winning and dining with political manipulators around him.
He said: “The decision of the President to go to Katsina as commander-in-chief, to talk to the service chief and our men and women in uniform, gladdened my heart to no end. This is because that’s a time which ordinarily, President Tinubu that I know, would have been spent carousing with his political manipulators and thinking how to do some other things, but on that day, he went and saw the troops. He needs to follow up with the troops.
“I’ve been making some investigations since that time. I noticed that the morale of the armed forces became better. Even those who are not in the front where he went felt that they had a commander-in-chief.
“If you see more of that on a daily basis and less of the politics, then you start to see those who are managing the economy, not people who are just disguising as economy managers, but who, in reality, are campaign fundraisers.
“If we see people running the economy, then we’ll be happy because what we owe the people of Nigeria is good governance.”
He also warned that anybody, including himself, who wants to be a president, must be prepared to give good governance; a condition, he said, is lacking in the current administration of President Tinubu
“Anybody who wants to be president, like me and others, must be prepared to give good governance to the people. If the person who is there; whom you want to defeat and take over from, is giving good governance, somehow you’ll be happy. But if he’s not giving good governance, you’ll be very angry and that is the situation we’ve seen. President Tinubu is just not giving good governance. He’s not giving good governance because he’s not giving governance at all,” he added.
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