•Atiku and Tinubu
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar says over two years after taking the reins, there is no sign that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu can address the prevailing hunger and poverty in the country.
The opposition leader who described the hunger in the country as unacceptable, especially the underprivileged poor and down-trodden, said “most violent socio-political eruptions and revolutions all over the world had often been powered by pervasive hunger and unbearable material conditions – especially the paradox of squalor amidst plenty in our land.”
Atiku in a statement through his Spokesman, Mr Paul Ibe, on Monday, said whereas the primary objective of any government is the security and welfare of its citizens, the masses of Nigerians are progressively wallowing in misery and poverty under the watch of the President Tinubu-led All Progressives Congress (APC) administration.
According to Atiku, the current situation does not give cause for cheers as it engenders an increasingly progressive propensity for criminalities in the form of high-wire fraud, terrorism, kidnapping, cultism, drug addiction and ritual sacrifice, among others, reports Daily Trust.
He counselled that the “current unacceptable situation offers an opportunity for reflection” and cited the French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Arab Spring in which a young man caught in the maelstrom of unbearable frustration set himself ablaze in a development which occasioned violent socio-political eruptions starting out from Tunisia to engulf the Middle-East and North Africa.
He said, “Back home here in Nigeria, it may not be out of place to argue that even the “ENDSARS” protest was fuelled by the traumatising frustration of hunger and insensitivity on the part of the government.”
“Whatever reform the Tinubu government might claim to be undertaking, the point remains that food insecurity is a daily occurrence nationwide. There is no government worth its salt that does not place priority on the welfare and security of the people.”
He stressed further that since reforms are made for citizens and not the other way round, the reforms of this administration should have a human face.
“Whether the present powers accept it or not, the reality of our existence is that the poor are increasingly dying of hunger while the majority of the living poor exists at the mercy of the ill-advised policies of this government,” he said.
