PDP dismisses Tinubu’s New Year address, calls if harvest of deceit, empty claims

•Says it’s admission of failure

By Lateef Ibrahim, Abuja

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has dismissed the New Year Speech by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as a harvest of deceit, false claims and empty promises.
The PDP described the speech as unpresidential, uninspiring and amounts to a waste of valuable time as it did not address any of the critical issues plaguing the nation.
The party said this in a statement yesterday by its National Publicity Secretary, Hon Debo Ologunagba in Abuja.
Nigerians, the leading opposition party said, were dismayed as President Tinubu employed rhetoric and failed to address the critical issues of insecurity, decayed infrastructure, comatose manufacturing and productive sectors; crushing 28% inflation rate, continuing plunge of the Naira, alarming unemployment, excruciating poverty and economic hardship occasioned by the reckless, ill-advised and insensitive policies and programmes of his administration.
According to the PDP, “President Tinubu failed to address the vexatious issue of incompetence, insensitivity, massive profligacy, unbridled treasury-looting inherent in his administration, which have put our nation in dire strait.
“More distressing is that President Tinubu had no words in his New Year address for the Christmas eve genocidal massacre of over 200 Nigerians by terrorists in Plateau State and the murder of over 5,000 citizens in Plateau and other States of the federation under his watch since May 29, 2023. What manner of a President?
The PDP stated that it is an unpardonable assault on the sensibility of Nigerians for President Tinubu to brazenly assert that ‘everything I have done in office, every decision I have taken and every trip I have undertaken outside the shores of our land, since I assumed office on 29 May 2023, have been done in the best interest of our country’.
“On the contrary, all decisions and actions of the Tinubu Presidency including the approval of increase in the pump price of fuel from N167 to over N700 per liter, devaluation of the naira with the consequential high costs and hardship; skewing of the 2024 budget in favour of luxury appetite of the Presidency and APC leaders without concrete policies to revive the economy and create jobs; the wasteful foreign trips with political cronies and failure to address the mindless killings across the nation cannot be said to be in the interest of our country”, it said.