Mid-term assessment: Tinubu is a sacrificial president – APC

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has described President Bola Tinubu as a sacrificial president who had the courage to completely take out the contentious fuel subsidy, despite the fact that he knew from the beginning that it would attract serious criticism and condemnation to him.

National Publicity Secretary (NPS) of the party, Barr. Felix Morka while briefing the media to mark the second anniversary of the administration of President Tinubu said earlier presidents were not bold enough to remove the subsidy which he said was only done by Tinubu because he had a clear agenda to reshape the national economy for the interest of all Nigerians.

He said it was wrong for people to begin to hackle the government, despite the fact that it has been doing all that is necessary to fix the numerous problems it inherited from past administrations.

“In two years of this administration, we made clear that this president has enacted a vision and proclaimed a mission to tackle problems that were created generationally in our country. All of the difficulties we speak about today didn’t drop from the sky. They were long in coming.

“As I said, all the presidents who came before this president preferred to simply postpone the doomsday. Because we didn’t just wake up in the last two years to realize that fuel subsidy was a destructive device in our country. We didn’t.

“We’ve always known that, and as a matter of fact, there’s no president who has come in the last 15-20 years who didn’t, in fact, remove fuel subsidy. Because when you think back, fuel was not at the point that President Olusegun Obasanjo met it back in 1999.

“So it means that other presidents were in fact taking out subsidy, you know, gradually. But let me tell you the difference between this president and the rest of them; other presidents who intervened in the fuel subsidy regime did so to save a bit of money and to free up some money to get their job done.

“Because, you know, when you have between your debt servicing commitments and fuel subsidy and you were spending over 95-98% of all revenues in the country, as a president, you see money coming in, but you can’t touch it because it’s already pre-committed to existing obligations. What does that mean? It means you had to govern with nothing, which is why we saw a lot of borrowing”.

According to Morka, the problem was not created by the administration because there were a lot of economic commitments that the country was bound to attend to.

“It wasn’t coming from our government because our government was already completely mortgaged to these serious national economic commitments. The debt servicing and the subsidy regime. Now, how can anyone, any country, survive on that money? It was completely unsustainable.

“But, see, the difference between President Bola Tinubu and the rest of them was that this president, you know, once he was inaugurated, he took an oath and said, you know what, enough. He knew, and we know, that doing what this president has done would likely make him unpopular in the beginning, which we are all witnesses to.

“However, that calculation and the relevance, the significance of that to the electoral prospects of 2027 did not stop him because he decided to put the strategic best interest of our country over and above his own electoral calculation.

“So when the opposition simply bandy stories around, ‘oh things have happened, rice has gone up and all that’, that’s why the president is on the top, because he knew that was going to come. And he was willing to stake highly so our country can have that shot at not just recovery, but some serious foundational repair that can then support rapid growth and prosperity down the road. So this is a sacrificial president who is willing to stake even his own political interests for Nigeria”.

The APC spokesman further reassured that things are beginning to change for the better, adding that in the next few years, Nigerians wil begin to feel the positive impact of the policies of the Tinubu administration.

Morka added that on all fronts things are getting better, including in the are of security. He urged Nigerians irrespective of their standing to take advantage of the improving security situation to engage in some kind of farming.

“But this government is freeing up gradually, freeing up that flexibility for Nigeria, and creating incentives for people to go to the land and take land. How many Nigerians are really preparing their children to take the land, whether on a subsistence level or on a mechanized level? How many Nigerians? You see, we ought to really pay attention and support our country. The incentives that this administration is creating, opportunities that it’s creating, we must take advantage of it”.

The NPS also disagreed with those who are taking the recent endorsement of President Tinubu for a second term as campaigns, adding that there are a great difference between meeting to pass a vote of confidence on someone and campaigning.

“Who is campaigning? Nobody is campaigning. Endorsement is not campaigning. A vote of confidence is something that is routine in any organization.

“People wake up in the morning and even when they decide to pass a vote of confidence on someone or on an institution, that is not campaigning. I don’t think that’s correct in the way you framed it.

“I think we’re confusing or conflicting INEC timelines for certain actions with the freedom and democratic liberty of people, citizens, politicians to express themselves. Those expressions may come politically, they come even in partisan notes, but that doesn’t mean anyone is campaigning. When you campaign, I don’t think you’d be wondering”.

The ruling party equally gave thumbs ups to the government over the handling of the security situation in parts of the country, insisting that the era of heightened state of insecurity is getting over.

“I think we should be fair in how we frame this conversation about insecurity. Because when we speak, oh, insecurity is on the rise, it’s, you know, we’ve seen a lot of such insecurity in certain parts of the country. That may be true, but it is also true that the government and its security forces are not sleeping.

“Those who are determined to do evil, will do evil irrespective. You can’t stop them because they don’t mean well. Part of what drives them is to create that havoc and kill people, make people, disturb the peace.

“That is what appeals to their very darkest minds. And we cannot celebrate them as a people. Because, you know, as the National Security Advisor presented it at the National Summit the other day, about 13,543 terrorists have been neutralized in the last few years.

“Think about it. 13,000 human beings, neutralized. Who are these people who are willing to be killed because they are looking to kill innocent people? What drives them? We must get into their own psychology to understand where they’re coming from”.

Morka also defended the administration of the immediate past President Muhammad Buhari, describing as a stop gap leader who also did well given the circumstances of the country at the time he took over.

“Now, the other predicate of your question is about, you know, the Buhari years. Look, today is, like I said, is a day to really take in the progress we’re making, it’s not a day to get political or to reflect, you know, that far back.

“Because you cannot talk about Buhari without talking about the circumstances that Buhari himself stepped into and had to manage. Me, I’m the one saying this, and I’m not saying this on behalf of the party.

“In my personal understanding, Buhari was a stop gap president. He came in to simply hold still a country that was already flipping off the key, flipping off the precipice.

“The country was, you see, look, all of the fallacies of the PDP is that the economy did better under their watch. It didn’t, the economy we ran was a phantom economy. An economy where contracts were awarded, security votes were given.

“We saw what happened when Buhari took over, concerning Dasuki’s NSA, where billions of dollars meant to fight the world terror were simply shared to everybody today who had courage and opening their mouth to speak in the PDP. It was simply a question to them. What happened to all the money voted for the power, the whole power sector reform? Again, shared out.

“The Lagos-Maiduguri Expressway was awarded multiple times, but never done. Second Niger Bridge, awarded multiple times, never done. Where do you think all that money went? The money went into building estates and paying architects to design estates for private individuals.
Money that was meant to procure and produce common good were diverted.

“Buhari simply came to simply plug the hemorrhage, like an emergency treatment. When you rush a person in, the nurses are not interested in long-term issues, they want to just stop that bleeding, let the blood clot, let that man get the oxygen, let him do that. That was Buhari’s mission.

“So I think it would be drastically unfair to evaluate Buhari’s administration against any sort of objective standard because every president will govern based on what he met on the ground”.